Previous
Setting
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 5
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":
[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 [...].
