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Similes
Chapter 17
Explanation and Analysis—Choose Your Cause:
In Chapter 17, Marathe uses logos to criticize American patriotism and loyalty to fickle leaders like Rodney Tine. Steeply fires back, pointing out the situational irony of Marathe's argument:
‘Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. only pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.’
‘How are your wife and kids doing, up there, by the way?’
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Chapter 36
Explanation and Analysis—Karen Carpenter:
In Chapter 36, Joelle almost dies of an overdose in Molly Notkin's bathroom. The music playing in the bathroom is an allusion that highlights the situational irony of Joelle's drug problem:
Unlock with LitCharts A+[S]he can’t stand it and reaches out for the cold tub’s rim’s cold edge to pull herself up as the white-party-noise reaches, for her, the sort of stereophonic precipice of volume to teeter on just before the speakers blow, people barely twitching and conversations strettoing against a ghastly old pre-Carter thing saying ‘We’ve Only Just Begun,’ Joelle’s limbs have been removed to a distance where their acknowledgment of her commands seems like magic...
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Chapter 58
Explanation and Analysis—Madame Psychosis Tapes:
In Chapter 58, Mario overhears a recording of Madame Psychosis's voice through the window of Ennet House. This moment is a good example of both dramatic and situational irony:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Mario is arrested by the quiet but unmistakable sound of a recording of a broadcast of ‘Sixty Minutes More or Less with Madame Psychosis,’ which Mario has never taped a show of because he feels it wouldn’t be right for him but is strangely thrilled to hear someone in Ennet’s thinking enough of to tape and replay.
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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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