Dogs at the Poker Table

So we’ve done some cool literary devices in the past but we’ve never done personification. It came up in my house this week because my mom’s dog, Clemson, has been staying with us and we’ve been speaking for her all week: “But, Kasie, I love walking in the neighborhood and sniffing everything and never peeing. Let’s do it again.”

All the sarcasm, silliness, and fun of pretending we know what the animal thinks led Charlie to suggest this topic for the show. It made me think of books that have animals as main characters and how and if the author chose to put us in the mind of that animal. So that’s what we’re talking about today. It’s an animal lovers’ paradise, complete with silly voices.

Definition time: personification is a noun meaning the attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to something nonhuman, or the representation of an abstract quality in human form.

So the first obvious thing to unpack is how authors assume one of two things:

1. We have to get in the mind of the animal and think about what it knows, doesn’t know, and cares about or doesn’t care about.
2. We pretend the animal acts and thinks like a human.

Full show notes out on the blog here.