Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

• Literary Term: personification- endowing non-human objects or creatures with human qualities or characteristics
• Example: "And dying as she was, she cried in agony." [speaking about the ship]
• Quote: "Somehow, the glass on its front had not broken."
• The sentence above was stated after the crew had evacuated the Endurance, which was being crushed by ice of the Antarctic.  I felt that this quote served as both a symbol and a foreshadowing device.  The glass of the ship symbolizes the twenty-eight men who made up the crew.  Both the men and the glass are extremely fragile things that should have easily been demolished by the forces working against them.  By saying that the glass had somehow survived the pressure of the crushing ice, author Alfred Lansing foreshadows that the men will also be able to endure the terrors of their new environment.  The prospect that an underdog can find the strength to overcome tremendous odds almost always makes for an intriguing tale.  After reading about the brutal conditions in which these men would be forced to live in, one's mind immediately begins to wonder how they could possibly survive.  This foreshadowing hint that they in fact do manage to survive entices the reader to press on in order to discover how Shackleton's and his crew were able to do so.