payment page
Johnson uses figurative language to add color and humor to his story and to give readers a unique perspective on his characters, setting, and events. He uses personification to describe the traumatic feelings Georgie and the narrator experience while on drugs. While mopping up imaginary blood, Georgie says, “[t]here’s so much goop inside of us . . . and it all wants to get out.” This grotesque imagery suggests that Georgie believes the body is driven toward death instead of to life.
When the narrator finds Georgie a second time, his friend is “bent over in the posture of a child soiling its diapers.” Georgie’s hallucinations reduce him to childhood and the very base of bodily functions. Johnson returns to this imagery when the narrator states his own fear of his hallucinatory angels, which “cut through my heart and down the knuckles of my spine, and if there’d been anything in my bowels I would have messed my pants with fear.”
Johnson also uses figurative language to describe other feelings evoked by drug use. Pills make the narrator “feel like a giant helium-filled balloon” which is a simile to describe the sensation of lightness or euphoria. In the woods the narrator sees “a general grayness . . . giving birth to various shapes,” an example of personification to convey a sense of transformation.
The author also uses understatement and hyperbole to provide comic relief from the story’s serious and tragic scenes. For example, when Nurse suggests that Mr. Weber, with a knife buried in his eye socket, should lie down, he responds with the understatement, “I’m certainly ready for something like that.” When Nurse says she has to look out for herself and family and not Georgie, the Family Services doctor replies with a hyperbole, “Don’t chew my head off.” And when Georgie talks of raising the baby bunnies, he claims that “[t]hey'll get as big as gorillas,” a hyperbolic simile.
