The following passage is from a contemporary story about a city planner named Irene.
In the cramped office of the municipal planning department, Irene worked between the towering stack of pending zoning violations on her left and the ledger of developers' campaign contributions on her right. Every decision she made was a meticulous negotiation, a charting of a course through a strait so narrow that she felt the paint scraping off her sides. To lean too far toward regulatory zeal was to risk the wrath of the city council; to bend too far toward the developers was to invite the ruin of the local wetlands. In the quiet of the evening, she saw her career as a perilous navigation between Scylla and Charybdis, where one misstep would either tear her professional integrity to pieces or drown her in political ruin.
Which of the following best describes the function of the allusion to Scylla and Charybdis in the passage?
- Adescribe the actual geographical hazards of the coastal wetlands surrounding the municipal building
- Bassert the author's personal moral condemnation of the developers' corrupt influence on municipal governance
- illustrate the dual, equally destructive forces between which Irene must navigate to maintain her positionCevap
- Dimply that Irene is planning a literal sea voyage to escape the moral compromises of her bureaucratic work
- Eprovide a chronological summary of the specific zoning files Irene must resolve before her evening shift ends