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Examples Of Metonymy In To Kill A Mockingbird

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In the thrilling fiction novel To Kill a Mockingbird, author Harper Lee uses memorable characters to explore Civil Rights and racism in the segregated southern United States of the 1930s. In the context of the example, Atticus had recently shot a dog because it seemed threatening to the neighborhood. The metonymy in this example is the word “shot” referring to a gun, which in turn refers to a gunman. The metonymy compliments Atticus’s skill in gunmanship due to the fact that it refers to him as being the “shot”, almost as if he were part of the weapon. The use of metonymy in the example is to create a further insightful glimpse at Atticus. By saying “the deadest shot” it implies that Atticus was an excellent marksman and had deadly accuracy.

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