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Personification
Explanation and Analysis—Hunting:
In Book 4, Adah describes the climax of the animal hunt with imagery, metaphors, and personification.
As the ring burned smaller we suddenly caught sight of its other side, the red-orange tongues and black ash closing in. The looming shapes of animals bunched up inside: antelopes, bushbucks, broad-headed warthogs with warthog children running behind them. A troop of baboons ran with arched tails flying as they zigzagged, not yet understanding their entrapment. Thousands of insects beat the air to a pulpy soup of animal panic.
Several different animals are personified: the "warthog children," the baboons that do not understand their imminent death, and the insects that panic. This allows the reader to sympathize with the animals' predicament, and it also emphasizes how life and death are connected: only by burning these innocent animals alive can the villagers survive. A metaphor makes the air, filled with insects, into a "pulpy soup," while the insects swarm so thickly that the air seems to turn to liquid. The visual imagery, which includes this metaphor as well as the descriptions of the animals and the fire, gives the reader a vivid picture of what this unique hunt looks like:
Others would not come out and so they burned: small flame-feathered birds, the churning insects, and a few female baboons who had managed against all odds to carry their pregnancies through the drought. With their bellies underslung with precious clinging babies, they loped behind the heavy-maned males, who would try to save themselves, but on reaching the curtain of flame where the others passed through, they drew up short. Crouched low. Understanding no choice but to burn with their children.
The baboons are further personified here: the females have "precious clinging babies," and the males "[understand] no choice but to burn with their children." The word choice here is subtle, but it effectively humanizes and creates sympathy for these animals. They do not have "offspring" or "juveniles" but instead have "precious clinging babies." The male baboons likewise seem to eventually have enough intelligence to resign themselves to death.
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