Analysis Of 'The Snails' By Tamera Lepore

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Recommended: Significance of figurative language in literary writing

Focusing on the images seen by some very intriguing characters, Tamera Lepore creates two stories alike in style, but told from incredibly differing view points. While both Vignettes follow a similar structure, they employ different use of diction and imagery to create differing tones. While the first Vignette, The Snails, has a more hopeful, and light tone, the second takes on a bitter, hopeless tone. Throughout the first Vignette, the author utilizes diction in a well thought out way, choosing words like light, warm, and glittering to paint the image of another beautiful morning and create a serene mood. One can almost feel the hope the snails feel in the world with lines like “The land they had found themselves in had grown increasingly …show more content…

When describing the scenery, the author writes in a more elliptical style, allowing the reader to build the scene using the figurative language provided. One simile Lepore uses to help envelop the reader even further into the snails’s world is, “Fresh water from last night's rain was falling from the rustling leaves and sparkling like stars falling” (Ln. 2-3). The author also includes personification in her mission to bring people into the almost believable world of legged snails and armed slugs, in lines 17 through 19 with “Another lake reclined in front of him, lazily reaching out towards the new day. The light seemed to be reaching right back, leaving beautiful streams of fire throughout the immense body of water,”. Lines like these allow the reader to see life through the eyes of three hopeful snails running through beautiful landscapes and interacting in a realistic …show more content…

This use of description allows for a more emphatic style in contrast with the “Go around the point” style of the first Vignette. The lack of simile also makes the use of figurative language stronger, for example when Francis “… felt as if a large piano had dropped from a third story window, smashing him into the ground,” (Ln. 36). The statement was much more powerful than if it had been used in the first Vignette which had a lot of similar language. Despite lacking a lot of figurative language, Lepore is able to build the slug’s atrocious vision of the world around

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