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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 1
Explanation and Analysis—Undernourished Leprechaun:
On the breakneck drive that begins the novel, Jack introduces the reader to the many characters in the car that races Willie Stark to Mason City. These include Willie's driver, and one of his closest confidants, Sugar-Boy O'Sheean. With his characteristic wit and specificity as a narrator, Jack explains how Sugar-Boy earned his nickname:
His name was O'Sheean, but they called him Sugar-Boy because he ate sugar. [...] He'd pop the cube in over the barricade of his twisted black little teeth, and then you'd see the thin little mystic Irish cheeks cave in as he sucked the sugar, so that he looked like an undernourished leprechaun.
Explanation and Analysis—A Great Potato:
During the visit to the Stark home in Chapter 1, Jack imagines Lucy and Willie's father, years before, spending time together soon after Willie and Lucy were married. The father- and daughter-in-law have a special affection for each other and often sit in amicable silence together, "a world of wordless silence by the fire, a world which would absorb effortlessly and perfectly the movements of their day and their occupations." Jack explains why the two are especially friendly:
Unlock with LitCharts A+They had something in common, Old Man Stark and Lucy Stark, who had loved and married Willie Stark, the Willie Stark who at that moment when she and the old man sat wordlessly before the fire was upstairs in his room [...], but not even in that room, either, but in a room, a world, inside himself where something was swelling and growing painfully and dully and imperceptibly like a great potato in a dark, damp cellar.
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Explanation and Analysis—Glassy, Starlit Sea:
When Willie and his team visit his family home outside Mason City, Lucy makes dinner for Willie, Old Man Stark, and the other guests. She is very pleased to be able to feed everyone, as Jack describes in a simile:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The jaws got to work around the table, and she watched them work. [...] Her face seemed to smooth itself out and relax with an inner faith in happiness the way the face of the chief engineer does when he goes down to the engine room at night and the big wheel is blurred out with its speed and the pistons plunge and return and the big steel throws are leaping in their perfect orbits like a ballet, and the whole place, under the electric glare, hums and glitters and sings like the eternal insides of God's head, and the ship is knocking off twenty-two knots on a glassy, starlit sea.
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Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—The Flea:
Chapter 2 begins with an extended flashback to 1922, when Jack was a reporter for the Chronicle and Willie was campaigning for reelection to the office of Mason County Treasurer. Willie was unlikely to win, as Jack describes in a simile:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Willie was coming up for re-election and his chances looked about as good as the chances of a flea making a living off a carved marble lion on a monument.
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Explanation and Analysis—Political Anemia:
Willie is slow to realize, in Chapter 2, that his candidacy for governor in 1926 is a setup by the Democratic Party. Willie still gives his speeches boldly and earnestly, but he doesn't understand that he was set up to run as a joke, set up by MacMurfee to foil Harrison. At this point in the campaign, Louisianans have started to lose interest in Willie's message, but he doesn't see the reason. Jack describes the still-vital Willie through simile:
Unlock with LitCharts A+If a man ever had a right to look worried, it was Willie. But he didn't. He just looked like a man in a kind of waking dream, and when he walked out on the platform before he began talking his face looked purified and lifted up and serene like the face of a man who has just pulled out of a hard sickness. But he hadn't pulled out of the sickness he had. He had galloping political anemia.
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Chapter 7
Explanation and Analysis—You Are In Love:
In an extended flashback describing his romance with Anne, Jack observes the moment when he realized he was in love. He uses two different similes to describe the unusual feeling:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Then I thought, quite objectively as though I were observing the symptoms of a total stranger: You are in love. I was, for a moment, bemused by that thought. That I was in love. And that it wasn't a bit like the way I had thought it would be. I was surprised, and a little bit awed by the fact, like a person who learns unexpectedly that he has inherited a million dollars [...]. I got out of bed, very carefully, handling myself with awe-struck care as if I were a basket of eggs.
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Chapter 10
Explanation and Analysis—Lifting the Sheet:
After Willie and Adam's deaths, Jack sets out to investigate who tipped off Adam about Anne's affair with Willie. In Chapter 10, Jack asks Anne whether she has any idea who it was. He describes how, while still grieving the deaths of her brother and lover, she tries to remember:
Unlock with LitCharts A+"Did he say who had telephoned him?"
She thought a minute. You could see her, even as she sat there, lifting the sheet off that moment when Adam had burst in on her, like somebody lifting the sheet off the face of a corpse on a marble slab in a morgue and peering into the face.
Then she shook her head. "No," she said, "he didn't say—" she hesitated— "except that it was a man. I'm sure he said man."
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