"Death of a Pig"

I found this particular narrative captivating because of the way that E.B. White described the pig. As mentioned by Kayla, White uses a lot of personification to describe the pig. I think that is clever because it made me more sympathetic. It really showed the way that the narrator switched from seeing the pig as a source of income or food to a living being with feelings. He uses phrases like “when he opened his mouth to scream”, “giving him a frowning expression”, and “the patient was asleep” to give the pig a personality that seems realistically human. What struck me the most out of the ways that the pig was personified was the way that White described the slaughtering of the pig as “murder”. That is a perspective that I had never considered before. It puts animals and humans on the same level. Murder is a word that is traditionally used to describe wrongful death of a human, not an animal. Even if an animal dies due to neglect that is not considered murder. However, if a child was purposely neglected and ended up dying, that would be considered murder. Using a word as strong as murder to describe the death of the pig brings an entirely new sense of seriousness to the situation. Generally, when reading stories like this, I am sympathetic for the animals simply because they are suffering but the way that White gave the pig human qualities made me feel even worse for him. In that way it shows me how much personifying an animal or object can forge a connection with the reader.