The purpose of using personification in the excerpt is to show how

slow and regulated freight train travel can be.
easy it is to secure passage on freight trains.
difficult it is to get a job working on the railroad.
dangerous it is to jump onto a moving freight car.

The phrase that revels setting is whisper because it shows what he is doing .

The main themes of the play are: fate and free will with the inevitability of oracular predictions is a theme that often occurs in greek tragedies the conflict between the individual and the state similar to that in sophocles’ “antigone” and   people’s willingness to ignore painful truths both oedipus and jocasta clutch at unlikely details in order to avoiding facing up to the inceasingly apparent truth and sight and blindness the irony that the blind seer tiresius can actually “see” more clearly than the supposedly clear-eyed oedipus, who is in reality blind to the truth about his origins and his inadvertent crimes.