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Definition of Simile
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like" or "as," but can also... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often... read full definition
Chapter 2: Miss Stein Instructs
Explanation and Analysis—Inaccrochable:
In Chapter 2, Gertrude Stein criticizes one of Hemingway's stories for its common language. Instead of giving her opinion straightforwardly, however, she uses an abstract simile that becomes a motif in the memoir:
“It’s good,” she said. “That’s not the question at all. But it is inaccrochable. That means it is like a picture that a painter paints and then he cannot hang it when he has a show and nobody will buy it because they cannot hang it either.”
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Chapter 11: Ezra Pound and the Measuring Worm
Explanation and Analysis—Ernest and Ezra:
Ezra Pound is a foil for Hemingway. Pound lives the kind of life Hemingway wishes he could establish for himself in Paris, but he struggles to make the kind of authentic social and professional connections that seem effortless for Pound. In Chapter 11, a simile helps Hemingway comment on this effortlessness:
Unlock with LitCharts A+If a man liked his friends’ painting or writing, I thought it was probably like those people who like their families, and it was not polite to criticize them. Sometimes you can go quite a long time before you criticize families, your own or those by marriage, but it is easier with bad painters because they do not do terrible things and make intimate harm as families can do. With bad painters all you need to do is not look at them.
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Chapter 14: Evan Shipman at the Lilas
Explanation and Analysis—Mansfield vs. Chekhov:
In Chapter 14, Hemingway alludes to two other short story writers, Katherine Mansfield and Anton Chekhov. He uses a series of similes to express his preference for Chekhov:
Unlock with LitCharts A+I had been told Katherine Mansfield was a good short-story writer, even a great short-story writer, but trying to read her after Chekov was like hearing the carefully artificial tales of a young old-maid compared to those of an articulate and knowing physician who was a good and simple writer. Mansfield was like near-beer. It was better to drink water. But Chekov was not water except for the clarity. There were some stories that seemed to be only journalism. But there were wonderful ones too.
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Chapter 17: Scott Fitzgerald
Explanation and Analysis—Scott's Deathbed:
Although Hemingway's memoir is not a work of fiction, he nonetheless turns some of his literary friends and acquaintances into parodies of themselves. One comedic example occurs in Chapter 17, when Hemingway uses a simile to convey a sense of F. Scott Fitzgerald's dramatic antics:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Back in the room Scott was still lying as though on his tomb, sculpted as a monument to himself, his eyes closed and breathing with exemplary dignity.
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Paris Sketches: Birth of a New School
Explanation and Analysis—Plank in a Sawmill:
In Paris Sketches: Birth of a New School, Hemingway tries to ignore a young man who keeps interrupting him while he is writing. Hemingway uses a simile and verbal irony to give the reader a sense of how irritating and vacuous he finds the young man:
Unlock with LitCharts A+I found I could go on writing and that it was no worse than other noises; certainly better than Ezra learning to play the bassoon.
“Suppose you wanted to be a writer and feel it in every part of your body and it just wouldn’t come.[...] Suppose once it had come like an irresistible torrent and then it left you mute and silent.”
Better than mute and noisy, I thought, and went on writing. He was in full cry now and the unbelievable sentences were soothing as the noise of a plank being violated in the sawmill.
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