POETIC DEVICES USED
- Personification is evident when “truth and forgiveness” are
“bigger and lonelier than words”. Here, Nair is attributing
human characteristics to the abstract ideas of forgiveness and
truth. Truth in itself cannot be lonely or bigger, but this
implies that genuine things that occurred such as the woman’s
son being murdered by the “patriot men” is a truth that is
lonely as this fact has left the grieving mother lonely as she…
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, mourned her child’s death. Similarly, this truth is personified
as “bigger” It is not physically bigger but because it is a
significant and tragic occurrence (the death of the son), it
exhibits the human characteristic of being large as it is
important and catastrophic in this old woman’s life.
Additionally, the past murder of the son has vacated space for
“forgiveness” that the woman can acquire towards the
murderers who killed her son. This is delicate and nearly
unimaginable act: to exonerate the people that killed her own
child and this has influenced the abstract idea of “forgiveness”
to be “bigger” than “words”: it is not just a word but is almost
human as it has taken a large part of the woman’s
subconscious and the absence of her son and time spent to
forgive the murderers has personified this “forgiveness” as
“bigger and lonelier”. These two abstract ideas are not merely
“words” but have the attributes and significance as if they
were people as they hold human characteristics of loneliness
and vast size.