What is a simile in chapter 21 of Walk Two Moons?
To find a simile in chapter 21 of Sharon Creech’s novel Walk Two Moons, one will have to understand what a simile is so that they’ll know what to be on the lookout for. A simile is a literary device that compares two unlike things. The comparison will contain some kind of comparison word—typically like or as. An author will often use a simile in order to give a description extra drama or contrast. As a simile brings together two different entities, they tend to be illuminating and thought-provoking.
In chapter 21, Mr. Birkway, Sal’s teacher, introduces a poem by the experimental, modernist poet e e cummings. In his poetry, cummings intentionally undercut normal rules regarding grammar and punctuation. His deviant syntax influenced how he stylized his name, which he chose not to capitalize.
Sal’s friend, Phoebe Winterbottom, is not impressed by cummings’s nonconformist connection to grammar....
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Mr. Brikway reads a cummings’s poem called “the little horse is newlY.” Phoebe quips that cummings probably never studied English, which is why his poem’s title looks like a typo.
Sal has a different opinion of the poem. She likes how only the y is capitalized. To her, that “Y looked like the newly born horse standing up on his thin legs.” Here, two unlike things are compared. A letter of the alphabet is compared to an animal. Specifically, a capital y is likened to a newborn horse. The comparison could make one think differently about the relationship between letters of the alphabet and animals. It should also make one think of a simile.
What are three similes in the first three chapters of Walk Two Moons?
In the first paragraph of Sharon Creech's Walk Two Moons, the narrator, Sal, says that she has lived most of her thirteen years in the countryside. However, she continues:
Just over a year ago, my father plucked me up like a weed.
This simile suggests that Sal was an inconvenience where she was. Flowers are also plucked, but the purpose of plucking flowers is usually to display the flowers or give them as a gift. Weeds are plucked to be thrown away. When she reaches her destination of Euclid, Ohio, Sal describes her new urban environment. There are no trees on the street, and the houses are right next to each other.
The houses were all jammed together like a row of birdhouses.
Sal thinks of the city in terms of things she already knows, and birdhouses are the only houses she has ever seen that are as uniform and cramped as the ones in Euclid.
A third simile in chapter 1 is extended, and takes several paragraphs to explain. Sal says,
I realized that the story of Phoebe was like the plaster wall in our old house in Bybanks, Kentucky.
She explains that after her mother left, her father kept chipping away at the wall. When he heard that she was not coming back, he pounded at it and eventually uncovered a brick fireplace. Sal says that her own story is hidden beneath Phoebe's story just as the fireplace was hidden behind the wall.
Can you provide a simile example from Walk Two Moons?
A simile is a figure of speech in which two unlike things are explicitly compared usually using the word "like" or "as."
Furthermore, as you start to point out, Creech has sprinkled similes throughout her book. For example, in Chapter 10:
"Being a mother is like trying to hold a wolf by the ears," Gram said.
Looking for more? Check out what the adults, especially Gramps, Gram, Dad, and Mr. Birkway, say to Sal about how to look at life.
However, in Walk Two Moons, the most important similes are the ones that readers are expected to complete on their own. For example, in Ch. 19, Sal's father says to her:
"You're trying to catch fish in the air. Your mother is not coming back" (Ch 19, p.115).
What is the other half of that simile? What is Sal's father suggesting is like trying to catch fish in the air?
The most important simile the reader has to complete on her own is the one that gives the book its title, Walk Two Moons. In Chapter 9, Creech gives the reader the first half of this simile through a proverb left by a "lunatic" on Phoebe's doorstep:
Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked two moons in his moccasins (Ch. 9, p.51).
By chapter 44, “Bybanks,” Sal has figured out the simile. So, she and Gramps take turns pretending that they are walking in someone else’s moccasins until Sal makes an unexpected discovery:
We walk in everybody’s moccasins and we have discovered some interesting things that way. One day I realized that our whole trip out to Lewiston had been a gift from Gram and Gramps to me. They were giving me a chance to walk in my mother’s moccasins—to see what she had seen and feel what she might have felt on her last trip (Ch. 44, p.276).
Can you figure out the simile based on the passage above? Walking two moons in a man's moccasins is like ... ?