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Irony
Definition of Metaphor
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor can be stated explicitly, as... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other... read full definition
Key Examples in Absalom, Absalom!
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Empty Hall :
Faulkner uses a series of metaphors to describe Quentin's heritage as a young man raised in the Deep South decades after the American Civil War. As Quentin wonders why Miss Rosa has decided to recount the events of her life to him, Faulkner writes:
Quentin already knew. It was a part of his twenty years’ heritage of breathing the same air and hearing his father talk about the man; a part of the town’s—Jefferson’s—eighty years’ heritage [...] Quentin had grown up with that; the mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad. His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts
Related Themes:
Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Sutpen and Coldfield :
Goodhue Colfield and Thomas Sutpen serve as foils for each other in the first chapters of the novel. Faulkner underscores the sharp contrast in their characters in his depiction of a scene in which Thomas Sutpen surprises the locals in Jefferson by attending church in an attempt to court Goodhue Coldfield's daughter, Ellen:
Unlock with LitCharts A+They watched in shocked amazement while he laid deliberate siege to the one man in the town with whom he could have had nothing in common, least of all, money—a man who obviously could do nothing under the sun for him save give him credit at a little crossroads store or cast a vote in his favor if he should ever seek ordination as a Methodist minister—a Methodist steward, a merchant not only of modest position and circumstances but who already had a wife and family of his own [...]
Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—War:
Mr. Compson uses a series of war metaphors when describing the attitudes of Rosa and her aunt toward Thomas Sutpen:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Though the aunt was gone, she still managed to bequeath and invoke upon each of these expeditions something of the old flavor of grim sortie, more than ever now against a foe who did not know that he was at war. Because now that the aunt was gone, Ellen had reneged from that triumvirate of which Miss Rosa tried without realising it to make two.
Now she was completely alone [...]; facing across the table the foe who was not even aware that he sat there not as host and brother-in-law but as the second party to an armistice.
Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis—A Thousand Homicides :
When Mr. Compson hands Quentin a letter, written from Charles Bon to Judith Sutpen, he uses a metaphor and hyperbole when comparing those who lived in the 19th century to those in the present day:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Yes, for them: of that day and time, of a dead time; people too as we are and victims too as we are, but victims of a different circumstance [...] not dwarfed and involved but distinct, uncomplex who had the gift of loving once or dying once instead of being diffused and scattered creatures drawn blindly limb from limb from a grab bag and assembled, author and victim too of a thousand homicides and a thousand copulations and divorcements. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps any more light than this would be too much for it.”
Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis—A Walking Shadow :
Rosa's engagement to Thomas Sutpen is abruptly called off when he rudely demands that she bear him a son before he will commit to marrying her. Rosa, however, uses multiple metaphors when explaining to Quentin that she was not angry at Sutpen, despite what others in the community believe:
Unlock with LitCharts A+I had nothing to forgive; I had not lost him because I never owned him: a certain segment of rotten mud walked into my life, spoke that to me which I had never heard before and never shall again, and then walked out; that was all [...] I mean that he was not owned by anyone or anything in this world, had never been, would never be [...] because he was not articulated in this world.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Unnecessary Instruments :
In her account of the day of the murder of Charles Bon and her encounter, at Sutpen's Hundred, with Clytie, Rosa uses a simile that describes "the movement of limbs" as being "like so many unnecessary instruments":
Unlock with LitCharts A+[The] face stopping me dead (not my body: it still advanced, ran on: but I, myself, that deep existence which we lead, to which the movement of limbs is but a clumsy and belated accompanyment like so many unnecessary instruments played crudely and amateurishly out of time to the tune itself) in that barren hall with its naked stair (that carpet gone too) rising into the dim upper hallway where an echo spoke which was not mine but rather that of the lost irrevocable might-have-been which haunts all houses [...]
Explanation and Analysis—The Lightless Womb:
While discussing her own difficult childhood, Rosa uses an extended metaphor that imagines her adolescent years as a protracted state of being in the womb of her mother:
Unlock with LitCharts A+I was fourteen then, fourteen in years if they could have been called years while in that unpaced corridor which I called childhood, which was not living but rather some projection of the lightless womb itself; I gestate and complete, not aged, just overdue because of some caesarean lack, some cold head-nuzzling forceps of the savage time which should have torn me free, I waited not for light but for that doom which we call female victory which is: endure and then endure, without rhyme or reason or hope of reward—and then endure; I like that blind subterranean fish [...]
Chapter 7
Explanation and Analysis—Like Ripples :
As Quentin narrates the story of Thomas Sutpen and his descendants to his Harvard schoolmate Shreve, Shreve interrupts Quentin to joke that he sounds like his father, Mr. Compson. In response, Quentin reflects upon the nature of stories and story-telling, using both simile and metaphor:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter.
Related Themes:
Chapter 9
Explanation and Analysis—Like a Doll :
In Quentin's account of Rosa's actions following the fire that finally destroys Sutpen's Hundred, he uses a simile that compares the elderly woman to a doll:
Unlock with LitCharts A+They—the driver and the deputy—held Miss Coldfield as she struggled: he (Quentin) could see her, them; he had not been there but he could see her, struggling and fighting like a doll in a nightmare, making no sound, foaming a little at the mouth, her face even in the sunlight lit by one last wild crimson reflection as the house collapsed and roared away [...].
