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Definition of Hyperbole
Hyperbole is a figure of speech in which a writer or speaker exaggerates for the sake of emphasis. Hyperbolic statements are usually quite obvious exaggerations intended to emphasize a point... read full definition
Hyperbole is a figure of speech in which a writer or speaker exaggerates for the sake of emphasis. Hyperbolic statements are usually quite obvious exaggerations... read full definition
Hyperbole is a figure of speech in which a writer or speaker exaggerates for the sake of emphasis. Hyperbolic statements... read full definition
Part 2, Chapter 2: The Voice from the Wall
Explanation and Analysis—Next-door Killer:
Lena St. Clair’s imagination gets the better of her when she listens each night to Teresa, the neighboring girl who shares a bedroom wall. As Teresa’s mother disciplines her daughter, Lena can hardly hold back her impressions of the violence:
Then I heard scraping sounds, slamming, pushing, and shouts and then whack! whack! whack! Someone was killing. Someone was being killed. Screams and shouts, a mother had a sword high above a girl’s head and was starting to slice her life away, first a braid, then her scalp, an eyebrow, a toe, a thumb, the point of her cheek, the slant of her nose, until there was nothing left, no sounds.
Lena’s imaginings are vividly gruesome but literally impossible. Exaggeratedly, the mother whittles her daughter away by braid, scalp, eyebrow, and then nose. The physical discipline is not an act of “killing,” violent though it may seem. When Teresa sneaks into her bedroom through the adjoining fire escape, she proves Lena’s hyperbolic suspicions wrong. A worried Mrs. Sorci embraces Teresa and ends up “laughing and crying, crying and laughing, shouting with love.” Lena’s childlike vulnerability leads her to misread tough love.
In its violent, exuberant excesses, Teresa’s household is a perfect negative against the ghostly sorrow that hangs over Lena’s own. The Sorcis fill their apartment with “scraping sounds, slamming, pushing, and shouts” while the St. Clairs slowly languish in “our silent house.” Her mother lies like a statue on her bed and breaks apart “like plates falling off a shelf one by one.” Lena’s fanciful catastrophizing betrays a need to seek out—and thereby measure herself against—a “more unhappy life.”
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