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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
Key Examples in Beloved
Part 1, Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Checkers:
In Chapter 2, Sethe compares how enslaved communities and families are often broken up and moved around to the game of checkers.
It made sense for a lot of reasons because in all of Baby’s life, as well as Sethe’s own, men and women were moved around like checkers. Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn’t run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized. So Baby’s eight children had six fathers. What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.
Related Themes:
Part 1, Chapter 10
Explanation and Analysis—Blood Eddy:
In Chapter 10, Paul D reflects on his further enslavement after Sweet Home and discusses how he began to tremble. He attributes the sensation to his blood, which he compares to a frozen river melting.
Unlock with LitCharts A+A flutter of a kind, in the chest, then the shoulder blades. It felt like rippling—gentle at first and then wild. As though the further south they led him the more his blood, frozen like an ice pond for twenty years, began thawing, breaking into pieces that, once melted, had no choice but to swirl and eddy. Sometimes it was in his leg. Then again it moved to the base of his spine. By the time they unhitched him from the wagon and he saw nothing but dogs and two shacks in a world of sizzling grass, the roiling blood was shaking him to and fro. But no one could tell.
Related Themes:
Part 1, Chapter 17
Explanation and Analysis—Hawk:
In Chapter 17, when Stamp Paid reveals to Paul D that Sethe killed Beloved, he spares Paul D some details that he still shares with the audience. One of these details is that in his account of the murder, he compares Sethe to a hawk.
Unlock with LitCharts A+So Stamp Paid did not tell him how she flew, snatching up her children like a hawk on the wing; how her face beaked, how her hands worked like claws, how she collected them every which way: one on her shoulder, one under her arm, one by the hand, the other shouted forward into the woodshed filled with just sunlight and shavings now because there wasn’t any wood.
Related Themes:
Part 2, Chapter 24
Explanation and Analysis—Rag Doll:
The novel compares Paul D and Sethe to rag dolls when describing how Beloved manipulated them. This imagery first appears when Beloved slowly pushes Paul D out of 124 in Chapter 24.
Unlock with LitCharts A+And then she moved him. Just when doubt, regret and every single unasked question was packed away, long after he believed he had willed himself into being, at the very time and place he wanted to take root—she moved him. From room to room. Like a rag doll.
Related Themes:
Part 3, Chapter 26
Explanation and Analysis—Rag Doll:
The novel compares Paul D and Sethe to rag dolls when describing how Beloved manipulated them. This imagery first appears when Beloved slowly pushes Paul D out of 124 in Chapter 24.
Unlock with LitCharts A+And then she moved him. Just when doubt, regret and every single unasked question was packed away, long after he believed he had willed himself into being, at the very time and place he wanted to take root—she moved him. From room to room. Like a rag doll.
Related Themes:
