Question

Read the passage from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings:

In those tender mornings the Store was full of laughing, joking, boasting and bragging. One man was going to pick two hundred pounds of cotton, and another three hundred. Even the children were promising to bring home fo’ bits and six bits.
The champion picker of the day before was the hero of the dawn. If he prophesied that the cotton in today’s field was going to be sparse and stick to the bolls like glue, every listener would grunt a hearty agreement.
The sound of the empty cotton sacks dragging over the floor and the murmurs of waking people were sliced by the cash register as we rang up the five-cent sales.
If the morning sounds and smells were touched with the supernatural, the late afternoon had all the features of the normal Arkansas life. In the dying sunlight the people dragged, rather than their empty cotton sacks.
Brought back to the Store, the pickers would step out of the backs of trucks and fold down, dirt-disappointed, to the ground. No matter how much they had picked, it wasn’t enough. Their wages wouldn’t even get them out of debt to my grandmother, not to mention the staggering bill that waited on them at the white commissary downtown….

Write one full paragraph that identifies the alliteration in this passage. Then explain why May Angelou uses alliteration. What is the effect?
AND PLEASE HELP ME OUT WITH THIS.

Answer 1

In the autobiographical novel “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou (1969), the author has used the stylistic device called alliteration. Alliteration is used when a number of words, having the same first consonant sound, occur close together in a series. The purpose of using this stylistic device is to focus on word sounds to further develop a picture, emotion, or sound. A clear example of the use of alliteration and its purpose in this passage is the following phrase “If the morning sounds and smells were touched with the supernatural…” (the repetition of /s/ sound). Here, alliteration focuses on words related to the senses (sounds, smells, supernatural) to describe “the late afternoon”.