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Do You Value Your Life?

Decent Essays
Do you value your life? Clive Staples Lewis once said, “God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we would only learn in no other way.” Through poetic techniques, Mark O’Connor emotionally and intellectually captures readers into distinctive images of the struggles in life and inevitable death, in order to teach us the importance of perseverance as well as to parallel society. O’Connor’s vivid topics of life and death are fuelled by his observation of nature. This is reflected in a whole range of his oeuvre, particularly in ‘Turtles Hatching’ and ‘The Sun-Hunters’, as they provide specific animalistic details to the diverse struggle of life that flora and fauna endure. Through the creative employment of figurative language and literal techniques, such as metaphors and the extensive use of verbs, O’Connor is able to address the complexity of life and death in means of teaching us to value our life. In the Turtles-hatching, we are able to see the harsh reality of life conveyed through metaphors and the enjambment of verbs which represent society and shows the importance of perseverance in life’s struggles. O’Connor shows us the hardships of life through an extended metaphor of new-born turtles struggling to get to shore. They are thrown straight away with obstacles described through “scrambling in sand, scrabbling in slime..” away from the gauntlet of predators. The sibilance suggests to us the restless agony they endure to
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