her, and anyone attempting to reach her was in danger of sinking.

The "large desolate eyes" and "tangle of...hair" deepens the characterization of childhood innocence; childhood hair is often a mess of tangles created during carefree adventures. This image contrasts that expectation with the precarious situation of Azucena, noted by the inability of anyone to reach her.

Imagery also demonstrates the courage of Azucena to accept her situation and to realize that she will not emerge from this entrapment:

The girl could not move, she barely could breathe, but she did not seem desperate, as if an ancestral resignation allowed her to accept her fate.

The reader is able to shift mental imagery here; this is not a desperate and frightened child. She continues to fight, yet it is also clearly evidenced by her demeanor that Azucena has the mature courage to perceive her inevitable outcome.

Much imagery follows as Rolfe Carlé and Azucena bond through his efforts to keep her alive, but the final image of this child is both beautiful and devastating:

But on the night of that third day, beneath the unblinking focus of quartz lamps and the lens of a hundred cameras, Azucena gave up, her eyes locked with those of the friend who had sustained her to the end. Rolf Carlé removed the life buoy, closed her eyelids, held her to his chest for a few moments, and then let her go. She sank slowly, a flower in the mud.

Her death is peaceful, and in her final moments, Azucena clings to the friend who tried so desperately to save her. The final metaphor shows how her beauty stands in sharp contrast to the devastation which surrounds her, even in death.

Much of the power in this story comes from the strong contrasts between the simple, remote setting of the mud-covered village and the massive media and technological presence. In particular, the tiny figure of Azucena is juxtaposed to the global image of her.

The village is overrun both with mud and reporters. The author uses massing--a wealth of accumulated detail--to show the impact of the media presence. Rather than summarize with a brief description, she renders a sharply detailed picture. The TV and film crews bring

spools of cable, tapes, film, videos, precision lenses, recorders, sound consoles, lights, reflecting screens, auxiliary motors, cartons of supplies, electricians, sound technicians, and cameramen.

It is an image of cold, metallic, machines, standing out against the natural landscape of the mountain farm town.

Because of the way Azucena was trapped, the reader gets an image of her face, pinched and drawn as she fights the pain. Much attention is paid to her head, as Rolf props it up with a tire, and we feel she is about to slide away from view. The author draws a vivid contrast of that diminishing with the publicity and attention, even fame, as her face grows metaphorically huge.

Azucena's face was beamed to millions of screens around the world.

Imagery is description using the five senses of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell.

The story is rich with images. Some examples follow:

First a subterranean sob rocked the cotton fields, curling them like waves of foam.

This sentence contains both sound and sight images. A "subterranean sob" would be a sound like crying/ rumbling ( a sob caught deep in someone's throat) from beneath the earth. We can picture the white cotton fields rocking and then curling like waves as the volcano builds up force. Both "cotton" and "foam" conjure a mental picture the color white.

Some other images would be: "a prolonged roar," an ominous sound image that directly precedes the volcano's eruption, and

walls of snow broke loose, rolling in an avalanche of clay, stones, and water that descended on the villages ...

We can picture white snow rolling down the mountain, and we can envision as well clay, stones, and water heading for the village.

Finally, we learn that

they [the villagers] could see that houses, plazas, churches, white cotton plantations, dark coffee forests, cattle pastures—all had disappeared.

We can form a mental visual image of a village and its surrounding fields and farmland suddenly gone, buried beneath the avalanche caused by the volcano. The vivid imagery conveys the sense of a placid, quiet place suddenly transformed by the unfathomable power of a natural force.

Images are pictures created with words.  Common forms of imagery are similes, metaphors and personification.

One of the strongest images in the story is the one the story opens with.

They discovered the girl’s head protruding from the mudpit, eyes wide open, calling soundlessly. (p. 1)

This is a very engaging way to begin the story, especially the use of the images “protruding” and “calling soundlessly.”

This image is followed up with other very powerful images, including “odor of death,” “wails of the injured filled the air” and the simile where her head is compared to a “black squash.”

The television cameras transmitted so often the unbearable image of the head budding like a black squash from the clay that there was no one who did not recognize her and know her name. (p. 1)

A simile compares two things using the words “like” or “as.”  Other similes are used, describes the lava as curling “like waves of foam”.  The geologists warnings “sounded like the tales of frightened old women” (p. 2)

There are also examples of personification.  The towns are described as going about their everyday business “deaf to the moaning of the earth” (p. 2) The volcano with “a prolonged roar announced the end of the world” (p. 2) and “the air around him seemed as murky as the mud” (p. 4).  You will see that there are many other similes.

Finally, there are metaphors, which compare without like or as.  The lava is described as a “viscous soup” (p. 2)

Of all the senses (sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste) the sense of taste is the one that is described the least in the story. There are, however, some references to food and drink.

For example, describing the morning when Rolf left to go the scene of the volcano eruption, the narrator recalls that she was "sat in the kitchen, sipping (her) coffee." Here the writer evokes the taste of coffee to emphasize how normally the day started. Coffee is a taste which most people associate with warmth, familiarity, and pleasure. By evoking this warm, familiar, and pleasant taste, the writer emphasizes, by contrast, how discomforting, unfamiliar, and unpleasant the day became when Rolf arrived at the scene of the eruption.

The taste of coffee is evoked again later in the story. Somebody brings some coffee to Rolf, who then "help(s) the girl drink it, sip by sip." Describing the effect of the coffee on the girl, the narrator says that the "warm liquid revived her." The writer here perhaps evokes the warm and pleasant taste of coffee to again emphasize, by contrast, the coldness and unpleasantness of the girl's situation.

Later in the story, Rolf feeds the girl with "a cup of the cornmeal mush and bananas the Army was distributing." The taste evoked here is perhaps not particularly pleasant, and also seems like the kind of food one might serve in hospital or to a baby. This then helps to emphasize how helpless the girl is in this moment. The fact that the girl "immediately vomit(s)...up" the food implies how weak she has become. For those of us unfortunate enough to remember what the taste of vomit is like in our mouths, this detail also perhaps helps us to empathize with the girl. She is trapped in the mud, cold and weak, and with the acidic taste of vomit in her mouth.

In the short story “Of Clay We are Created,” Isabel Allende uses a reliable first person narrator, Eva Luna. This story is a work of realistic fiction recounting the plight of a young girl during a volcanic eruption in Columbia in 1985, and the man who attempts to rescue her. Eva Luna is the companion of the story’s protagonist, Rolf Carlé, and she recounts his experiences with the young girl buried in clay, Azucena Lily.

The author uses a backstory to give the details of the villagers decision to continue living in their homes despite the warnings of the impending eruption, and the disastrous aftermath. There is also evidence of foreshadowing in this section when Eva describes the scene. The world’s eyes are strained upon the scene as the cameras project the event.

And every time we saw her on the screen, right behind her was Rolf Carlé,who had gone there on assignment, never suspecting that he would find a fragment of his past, lost thirty years before.

The story continues through the narrator’s eyes as she watches from a far away newsroom. She is able to see the nuances in Rolf’s face and changes in his demeanor, which she describes in detail. From the look in his eyes, she is aware when he has an epiphany. While staying with the young girl buried in clay, he has flashbacks to his own childhood. Through this experience, he confronts his childhood demons and comes home a changed man. The narrator explains all of this from her perspective.

This is a very broad question, and so for me I am going to focus on one form of figurative language that is explored in this short story which is symbolism. One of the central symbols of this story for me at least is the pump. This pump and its unattainability seems to be a symbol of the real lack of compassion and care of humanity in the face of suffering. Consider the following passage:

In the meanwhile, more television and movie teams arrived with spools of cable, tapes, film, videos, precision lenses, recorders, sound consoles, lights, reflecting screens, auxiliary motors, cartons of supplies, electricians, sound technicians, and cameramen: Azucena's face was beamed to millioins of screens around the world. And all the while Rolf Carle kept pleading for a pump.

Note how a very short and simple sentence is placed after a long sentence which lists all the sophisticated technology that reporters bring with them. They are able to do incredible things thanks to technology, but somehow bringing a pump to save Azucena eludes them. This contributes to the somewhat sarcastic and despairing tone employed in this section as Allende laments the inability of a technologically advanced world to save one girl.

If you want to explore the symbolism in this short story further, you might want to think about how Azucena herself is a symbol, as is the camera that Rolf Carle uses to protect himself from the world and ultimately, himself.