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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 If Beale Street Could Talk
Troubled About My Soul
Explanation and Analysis—Bigger than the World:
Following an awkward goodnight kiss, Fonny and Tish do not speak for a long time. But, when they meet again after a few weeks, Tish is still utterly in love with Fonny. As they ride the subway to Fonny's apartment in Greenwich Village, Tish looks into his face with adoration verging on hyperbole and struggles even to describe it, settling for absurd metaphors:
He was the most beautiful person I had seen in all my life.
[...] I suddenly looked up into his face. No one can describe this, I really shouldn't try. His face was bigger than the world, his eyes deeper than the sun, more vast than the desert, all that had ever happened since time began was in his face.
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Explanation and Analysis—The Changing Envelope:
If Beale Street Could Talk alternates between Tish visiting her lover Fonny in prison and Tish telling stories of their young courtship and romance. While Fonny is in prison, he and Tish can only talk on the phone while their bodies are separated. As a result, Tish's memories of their time together often focus on Fonny's body. In the passage below, Tish remembers when she and Fonny had sex for the first time. In the flashback, Fonny has just turned on the light and the two look at themselves, splayed out and naked. Tish describes what she sees using a metaphor:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Fonny's body was a total mystery to me—the body of one's lover always is, no matter how well one gets to know it: it is the changing envelope which contains the gravest mystery of one's life.
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Explanation and Analysis—Crossing the Sahara:
Tish visits Fonny in prison early in the book to tell him she is pregnant. When she leaves, distraught to part with Fonny, she remarks upon the prison, using an extended metaphor of the Sahara:
Unlock with LitCharts A+I walked out, to cross those big wide corridors I've come to hate, corridors wider than all the Sahara desert. The Sahara is never empty; those corridors are never empty. If you cross the Sahara, and you fall, by and by vultures circle around you, smelling, sensing, your death. They circle lower and lower: they wait. They know. They know exactly when the flesh is ready, when the spirit cannot fight back. The poor are always crossing the Sahara. And the lawyers and bondsmen and all that crowd circle around the poor, exactly like vultures.
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