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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
Chapter 15
Explanation and Analysis—Pests and Fumigation:
Pests like cockroaches and mice are a motif in the novel. In Chapter 15, which covers Tiny Ewell's stint in rehab, a nurse uses a metaphor that helps illuminate what the pests are doing in the novel:
He’d kept noticing mice scurrying around his room, mice as in rodents, vermin, and when he lodged a complaint and demanded the room be fumigated at once and then began running around hunched and pounding with the heel of a hand-held Florsheim at the mice as they continued to ooze through the room’s electrical outlets and scurry repulsively about, eventually a gentle-faced nurse flanked by large men in custodial whites negotiated a trade of shoes for Librium, predicting that the mild sedative would fumigate what really needed to be fumigated.
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Chapter 38
Explanation and Analysis—Spider Triage:
In Chapter 38, the narrator uses the metaphor of "sensory triage" to describe a skill that helps Gately in his sobriety journey. A sober counselor named Eugenio challenges Gately to prove that the talent does not in fact come from "The Spider," or addiction personified:
Unlock with LitCharts A+It was part of his gifts as a burglar: he can sort of turn his attention on and off like a light. Even when he was a resident here he’d had this prescient housebreaker’s ability to screen input, to do sensory triage.
...
Eugenio’d lovingly confronted Gately early on about his special burglar’s selective attention and about how it could be dangerous because how can you be sure it’s you doing the screening and not The Spider. Gene called the Disease The Spider and talked about Feeding The Spider versus Starving The Spider and so on and so forth.
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Chapter 62
Explanation and Analysis—Carved Out:
In Chapter 62, Steeply visits E.T.A. undercover to find out more about The Entertainment. An exchange between deLint and Steeply at the end of the chapter contains a metaphor that highlights the situational irony of E.T.A.'s "protective" attitude toward its students:
Unlock with LitCharts A+‘...You’re coming into a little slice of space and/or time that’s been carved out to protect talented kids from exactly the kind of activities you guys come in here to do. Why Orin, anyway? The kid appears four times a game, never gets hit, doesn’t even wear pads. A one-trick pony....Wayne’s your ideal food-group. Which is why we’ll keep you off him as long as he’s here.’
The soft-profiler looked around at the scalps and knees in the stands, the bags of gear and a couple incongruous cans of furniture polish. ‘Carved out of what, though, this place?’
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Chapter 65
Explanation and Analysis—Burning Building:
Chapter 65 deals with the topic of suicide, as the narrator turns from Hal's understanding of depression and suicide to Kate Gompert's. Kate understands there to be two types of depression, the worse of which she makes sense of with a poignant, ironic metaphor:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The person in whom [clinical depression's] invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. [These people's] terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors.
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Chapter 70
Explanation and Analysis—Hal-Sized Hole:
In Chapter 70, Hal confesses to Mario that he has been using marijuana in the pump room, and Pemulis is trying to help him cover it up. Hal uses a metaphor that demonstrates the situational irony of his deepest fear:
Unlock with LitCharts A+It seems different with me, Boo. I feel a hole. It’s going to be a huge hole, in a month. A way more than Hal-sized hole....And the hole’s going to get a little bigger every day until I fly apart in different directions. I’ll fly apart in midair. I’ll fly apart in the Lung, or at Tucson at 200 degrees in front of all these people who knew Himself and think I’m different. Whom I’ve lied to, and liked it. It’ll all come out anyway, clean pee or no.
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