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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 5
Explanation and Analysis—Basalt Prophets :
McCarthy uses a simile in Chapter 5 when describing the desert landscape as Sproule and the kid migrate south:
With the dawn they were climbing among the shale and whinstone under the wall of a dark monocline where turrets stood like basalt prophets and they passed by the side of the road little wooden crosses propped in cairns of stone where travelers had met with death.
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Chapter 6
Explanation and Analysis—Argonauts and Plague :
Imprisoned with Toadvine and Grannyrat Chambers, the kid witnesses people migrating south in search of gold. McCarthy makes use of a simile in order to compare these "goldseekers" to a plague:
Unlock with LitCharts A+They saw patched argonauts from the states driving mules through the streets on their way south through the mountains to the coast. Goldseekers. Itinerant degenerates bleeding westward like some heliotropic plague. They nodded or spoke to the prisoners and dropped tobacco and coins in the street beside them.
Chapter 9
Explanation and Analysis—Like Floating Temples:
At the start of Chapter 9, McCarthy describes the sun rising above a series of mountains using a simile:
Unlock with LitCharts A+He turned and placed one hand on the wooden cantle and looked toward the sun where it sat new risen above the bald and flyspecked mountains to the east. The floor of the playa lay smooth and unbroken by any track and the mountains in their blue islands stood footless in the void like floating temples.
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Chapter 11
Explanation and Analysis—S and L Alliteration:
Chapter 11 begins with an alliteration of "s" and "l" sounds as McCarthy describes an ascent up a wooded landscape:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The shoeless mules slaloming through the dry grass and pine needles. In the blue coulees on the north slopes narrow tailings of old snow. They rode up switchbacks through a lonely aspen wood where the fallen leaves lay like golden disclets in the damp black trail.
Chapter 12
Explanation and Analysis—Blood Legatees :
McCarthy incorporates two similes into one sentence in order to describe Glanton and his crew as they continue to ride south:
Unlock with LitCharts A+They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds.
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Chapter 15
Explanation and Analysis—Burning Bush :
After the kid refrains from killing an injured Shelby as Glanton had ordered him to do, he is separated from Tate as members of General Elias's army attempt to shoot them. With no horse, supplies, or allies, the kid stumbles across a lone tree burning in the desert, an allusion to the burning bush of the Bible:
Unlock with LitCharts A+It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog’s, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jedda, in Babylon.
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Chapter 20
Explanation and Analysis—The Eye of God:
As Toadvine, Tobin, and the kid discourse with the Judge, he claims the sun is akin to the eye of God through a simile which anthropomorphizes the sun:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Yonder sun is like the eye of God and we will cook impartially upon this great siliceous griddle I do assure you.
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