Personification and Allusion in "The Sieve and the Sand".

One of the most interesting personifications of the novel is:

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“The train radio vomited upon Montag, in retaliation, a great ton load of music made of tin, copper, silver, chromium and brass”. (Bradbury, 75).

This quote is a personification because it is impossible for trains to vomit; so Bradbury is giving human or living things´ characteristics to this object. However, this quote is also a metaphor; because the loud noise overwhelms the protagonist. In this way, he compares all the horrible sounding radio with vomit and metals because the sound, as metals, was heavy. 

With this quote, I noticed that Montag was becoming a stranger to the civilization in which he was living; the high sound of the propaganda and the TV parlor overwhelmed him and he preferred the silent and slow world of books.

The last figure that is going to be studied is the allusion. Bradbury uses this figure of speech in a high rate in Fahrenheit 451. In the second part of the book, he alludes to Plato´s Cave Allegory when he says “Half out of the cave” (Ignorance=Cave, Knowledge=Sunlight) or the people running in the eruption of the Vesuvius Volcano to compare, in a simile, how Mildred ran, as well as the mouth of this volcano which works as a metaphor of the TV parlor; the Cheshire smiles of the ladies, alluding to fictitious cat smiles in Alice in Wonderland or, in many cases, the merchant of Venice of William Shakespeare. Allusions are, in my opinion, a way to enrich the beautifulness of any literary work with the beautifulness of other writers´ works.

Allusion to how Mildred ran to receive her friends.
People run from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

Metaphor
(The mouth of the volcano is the TV parlor:
Where ideas "die")
Allusion to the Mouth of Vesuvius Volcano.

         

Allusion to the ficticious smile of the Cheshire cat in
Alice in Wodnerland. It stablishes that the ladies had
ficticious smiles.

Finally, I conclude that the Figures of Speech are one of the most important aspects that a writer has to take into account in order to write his/her work; because, if they don´t include them, their works will not have enough literary richness and they will run through us as a stream of insipid and tasteless words without quality or texture, as Faber said once.