How Does Gary Paulsen Use Descriptive Language In Canyons

¨Figurative language can give shape to the difficult and the painful. It can make visible and ´felt´ that which is invisible and ´unfeelable.´¨ -Mary Oliver. A main character is the most important person in the story, the one that is mainly talked about in the story. There's always a main character in a story, they are always involved in the most importants events. In the story Canyons by Gary Paulsen, the author uses Descriptive language and simile to develop the characters in the story to help the readers understand the two point of views of the main
Characters.

In the story Canyons, one technique the book uses is descriptive language. ¨There was no moon, but enough light came from the stars so that his eyes grew used the darkness he could see the canyons moving up into the sky.¨ The quote is showing descriptive language because it´s describing what Brennan's eyes saw in the sky, he says how the only light that he saw in the sky were the stars, it was dark because the moon was gone, and it was so dark the only thing he saw was the canyons going up to the sky.¨ Dust and sand so thick, they had

to cover their mouths with bandannas just to breathe.¨ The quote is showing descriptive language because it is describing the soldiers of the army had to put bandannas on their face because they couldn't breathe with all of the thick sand and dust blowing in their face. ¨The darkness seemed complete, thick, black, close around him, and he took it as a friend.¨ This quote is showing descriptive language because it is explaining what Brennan was experiencing as he was in the forest, everything seemed dark, scary but he wasn't, he acted like it was nothing when this dark side was there. This examples show descriptive language because it´s describing how something looks or how it happened in a certain way.

In the story canyons, another technique the author uses is simile. ¨Somewhere far away something screamed a faint cry almost like a woman or child screaming and he started, the remember reading somewhere that mountain lions screamed that way and thought it must be a cougar somewhere way off.¨ The quote shows a simile because it is explaining that the scream Brennan heard sounded like a woman or a child because the scream could of been a high pitched scream, Brennan remembered reading about mountain lions screamed like that and he assumed it was a cougar. ´The truth was, he had run off with another woman when Brennan was three and Brenna could only just remember a faint image of how he had looked like an old photo graph blurred and faded with age.¨ The quote shows a simile because it´s explaining that the older Brenna gets the more the photo of his father in his head disappears because his dad left when he was three years old and the image in his head of what his father had looked like was an old photo. ¨It was like a scene from a bad movie. They boy get Brennan thought, and they find him in the nick of the time and everybody lives
happily.

. . .¨ This quote is showing a simile because it´s explaining when the rescue team found him it was like when those movies always has a missing person they are looking for and once they find the missing person, everyone acts like nothing happened and the movie ends after they find them. These examples show simile because the quotes are comparing something to something else or it was similar to each other.

In the story canyons it’s showing the two characters point of views, also the author of the book uses simile and descriptive language to help reader understand these two techniques. The book canyons show what a simile is by comparing two things to each other and descriptive language is describing something. The author of the book is showing these two techniques to help the readers understand what is happening during the story and the events that are

happening.