Purple Personifications..

·       Imagery/Details: “Every piece of furniture they got is turned over. Every plate look like it broke. The looking glass hang crooked, the curtains torn. The bed look like the stuffing pulled out,” (Walker 37).

·       Simile: “Sometime I look down the path from our house and it look like a swarm of lightening bugs all in and through Sofia house,” (Walker 74).

·       Hyperbole: “My face hot enough to melt itself,” (Walker 77).

·       Oxymoron: “Little fat queen of England stamps on it…” (Walker 119).

·       Personification: “For six months the heavens and the winds abused the people of Olinka. Rain came down in spears, stabbing away the mud of their walls,” (Walker 153).

·       Wit: “Its time to leave you and enter into the Creation. And your dead body just the welcome mat I need,” (Walker 199).

It is apparent that the author of The Color Purple identifies her casual style of fictional writing by her use of copious rhetorical strategies, most prominently those in which she is blatantly comparing two things. Shown in the example of simile above, Walker exposes her style through the similarity of the brightness of a house to lightening bugs, which is a very identifiable scene with African American southerners. In this compelling novel, Walker also portrays her style through Celie, the main character, with the wit she provides in her letters to God and Nettie. These devices characterize Walker’s simplistic and provocative approach to writing and her free spirited way of confronting sensitive issues in the early 1900’s rural south.