In his story "The Landlady," Roald Dahl employs a variety of figurative language devices, such as imagery, simile, personification, and idiom. The story is especially strong in visual imagery.
Imagery is language that appeals to the five senses to provide a vivid impression, especially of a setting. The first paragraph includes visual imagery of the night sky, as well as tactile imagery regarding the extreme cold. Early in the story, the narrator provides a visual description of Billy’s clothing and detailed visual images of the previously elegant but now run-down neighborhood. Billy's observation of the boarding house, as well as his imaginings of what it would be like, include hints at sound, through the piano and parrot, and olfactory imagery of the "powerful smell of kippers" (fish). Later in the description of the landlady, the sense of smell figures prominently, as he cannot identify...
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if she smells of nuts, leather, or a hospital.
A simile is a comparison of unlike things for effect using like or as. One simile in paragraph 1 is "the wind was like a flat blade." When Billy feels drawn by the "BED AND BREAKFAST" sign, he feels that "each word was like a large black eye."
The description that follows is an example of personification, the attribution of human traits to inanimate objects, natural forces, or abstract concepts. In this passage, the words in the sign are personified, as he feels they are making him do things.
Each word was like a large black eye staring at him through the glass, holding him, compelling him, forcing him to stay where he was and not to walk away from that house.
An idiom is a phrase or sentence that has a customary meaning that is different from its literal meaning. When Billy begins to wonder about the landlady's state of mind, he thinks that she "appear[s] to be slightly off her rocker." This idiom means mentally ill, not that she has fallen off a chair.