Giving a thing, an animal, or an abstract idea actions, feelings, or speech proper to a person.
In The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
Call me Nature or Pandora; I am your mother and your enemy
Nature speaks in the first person, has a proper name, and declares a relation of kinship and enmity with Brás: an impersonal force gains a voice and a face.
Chapters I to IX: Death, plaster, and delirium, Pandora (in Brás's delirium)
realism came upon him, eaten by mange and worms, and out of compassion carried him off into its books
Chapters X to XVI: Childhood and Marcela, the narrator
the cancer is indifferent to the virtues of the subject; when it gnaws, it gnaws; gnawing is its trade
Chapters XVII to XXIV: Coimbra and His Mother's Death, the narrator
what did I find at the bottom of the carriage? My fifty years
Chapters CXVII to CXXXVI: Humanitism, Nhã-loló, and the Fifty Years, the narrator
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