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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
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Fallen Kite:
In Chapter 1, Charlie uses a series of similes to describe what it is like to watch Laura's body fall into the river. One of the similes later turns into an important extended metaphor:
And it is sudden when she falls. Fast. Like a white kite spearing the ground, its tail lolling lazily behind. She folds and crumples. Like a doll. Like a bag of wet bones. With a soft, horrible thud when she meets the earth. A sound that reminds me that she’s just loose meat. And I guess I shouldn’t be, but I am shocked by her lifelessness.
Laura's fall reminds Charlie of the moment when a kite falls out of the sky and hits the ground, or the moment when a child drops a doll on the ground. While she is in the air, she is almost beautiful. She gives the same illusion of life that a child projects onto a kite in the air or a doll in their arms. The second she hits the ground, she turns lifeless. The thudding sound "reminds [Charlie] that she's just loose meat," a realization that is all the more distressing and "shocking" because of the temporary illusion of life during her fall. Charlie isn't sure yet how she died, but he is already thinking about culpability—his own and others'. Society has dropped Laura with the same lack of regard a child displays when they drop a doll they are bored of playing with.
It is the kite simile that sticks in Charlie's mind after this scene. He returns to it at the end of Chapter 7, when some neighborhood children finally manage to get a kite into the air:
It’s easy to imagine it…as though they’ve tied a long string to the foot of a hovering hawk, keeping it on a thin leash to feel what it is to fly. And you want to let it higher, you want to spool out your line and hold it, just for the thrill, to see how far it goes. But once it’s out of view, you want it back again, don’t you? …And you want to tie it to something permanent, put it in a cage at night.…But of course you can’t do that. Holding something doesn’t make it yours.
The kite is inanimate, but Charlie compares it to a live bird on which the children have a tenuous hold. The kite-bird becomes a metaphor for relationships. Laura died because her father wanted too much control over her and her body. He created a living being and then, by refusing to let her have her autonomy, he turned her into the "bag of bones" Charlie and Jasper pushed off the dam. Charlie realizes that he does not want to do the same to anyone else. He has not done anything nearly as abusive as Pete Wishart has, but he has spent most of the novel trying to make sure Eliza won't hate him for his involvement in Laura's death. He now understands that in so doing, he has kept Eliza "caged." As much as he wishes he could ensure that she will not betray or abandon him and Jasper, he understands that he cannot have a real relationship with her as long as it is not her clear-eyed choice. He chooses to let her fly free as a bird instead of pulling her to the ground like an inanimate kite.
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Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Mosquito Murder:
In Chapter 2, Charlie contemplates Laura's death; he saw her beaten and hanged body with his own eyes, but it makes no sense to him how someone could have done such a thing. His incredulity is immediately followed by a moment of situational irony that helps make sense of the contradiction:
What I really can’t begin to understand is how it happened. How somebody could do it. How anybody could kill a girl. How they could take her into the bush and beat her down and hang her from a bare limb in her nightdress. How they could watch her die. How they could leave her there. How they could be capable. I snatch at a mosquito in front of my face. Wipe it on my shorts. I flinch. They’re everywhere. I hate insects.
The cruelty inflicted on Laura is shocking to Charlie. It contradicts everything he thinks he knows about human decency. The only conclusion he can reach is that some inhuman monster must have killed her. Jasper has suggested that "Mad Jack Lionel" might be the killer. Jack is an easy scapegoat because he is the town pariah. His nickname demonstrates that his sanity is already in doubt. Jasper is desperate to throw suspicion off of himself and onto someone else because he, too, is an outcast who people will likely scapegoat for Laura's death. After all, he has been scapegoated before. When Laura's body turns up, everyone will be on the lookout for the person in town who they deem the least human. Even Charlie imagines that that is the person who must be responsible for her murder. Who else could it be? And yet, no one he knows seems like a viable candidate.
Just as Charlie is contemplating this mystery, he kills a mosquito and "wipes it on his shorts." Most people do not see slapping a mosquito as a demonstration of casual cruelty. And yet, the context of this line helps the reader see that Charlie, the utterly human protagonist and narrator of the novel, has ended a life without any hesitation. Instead of remorse, he looks at the dead mosquito with the same disgust and "hatred" that must motivate many violent murders. Later in the novel, Charlie devotes a great deal of time and energy to contemplating humans' most sinister capacities. In this scene, he demonstrates a hint of the same willingness to kill he finds so perplexing. The mosquito becomes a symbol of sorts not for Laura, exactly, but more broadly for all the human victims of casual cruelty and hatred.
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Explanation and Analysis—Brick:
Charlie is overtaken with dread in the aftermath of Laura's death, a feeling that he repeatedly describes as a metaphorical brick in his stomach. One instance of this motif occurs in Chapter 2, while Charlie sits in his bedroom thinking about Laura's surviving sister:
This dread is lousy. When it hits, it’s like someone has turned the dial that controls gravity. Everything sinks hard and cold and fast. It winds you. It’s that same feeling, that same sad panic you confront when you can’t sleep, when your mind wanders and you remind yourself, for no reason at all, that you’re going to die one day...And in that act of knowing, something rushes inward and twists at your heart and you can’t breathe right. The knowing, it’s a cold kiln for this brick. It’s stuck firm. It’s not going anywhere.
The brick starts as more of an image than a metaphor; it is a way for Charlie to describe the cold, heavy sensation he has in the pit of his stomach. By inviting the reader to imagine what it would feel like to swallow a brick, or to have a brick formed inside of them and stuck in a "cold kiln," Charlie conjures a feeling that is far more specific and intense than plain "dread." Charlie returns to this specific feeling again and again. Over time, this repetition invites the reader to dwell not only on the feeling but furthermore on all its metaphorical implications. This passage makes it especially clear that the brick represents Charlie's indelible connection with Laura now that he has disposed of her body. Laura, too, "[sank] hard and cold and fast" over the edge of the dam, weighted down by a heavy stone so she would slip beneath the surface. Charlie didn't know Laura very well while she was alive. Now, however, his life is forever bound up with her death. He feels almost as though he has drowned along with her.
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Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis—Snow Dome:
Throughout the novel, Charlie sees his snow dome (what American readers might know as a snow globe) as a metaphor for the stifling effect Corrigan has on its residents. One instance of this motif occurs in Chapter 5, when Jasper talks about religion:
“Somethink else I could never understand,” he says, “is how people, ages ago, could look up at the moon and still reckon the world was flat. Flat, Charlie. See, that’s what I mean by people thinkin they’re the center of things....Everyone was convinced it was orbiting round them, not the other way round. It’s crazy. Like they were living in the middle of one of them snow domes. You know, the ones you’re supposed to shake up.”
Charlie's attention is piqued when Jasper mentions the snow dome because he has already been thinking that Laura's death has shaken up his world, as though he is at the center of a snow dome. Jasper's comparison (technically a simile) helps Charlie build out the metaphor of the snow dome. Charlie realizes that by imagining his world as a shaken up snow dome, he has been doing exactly what Jasper critiques in this speech: he has been placing himself at the center of the whole story.
Jasper does not have the luxury of believing the world revolves around him and his comfort. He has spent his life as an outsider, enduring the abuse and contempt of a majority-White town on account of his mixed-race background and neglectful single father. It is as though the White people of Corrigan believe they live in a bubble where everything is supposed to be picture-perfect and snow-white. They reject the idea that they are anchored to anything outside their insular community. People like Jasper and the Lu family are are targeted because they remind White residents that they are bound to a more complicated world that does not revolve around them. Charlie realizes that by thinking of Laura's death as something that has shaken his snow dome, he has reinforced the imaginary glass walls that White Corrigan residents weaponize against the people they see as threats.
Rather than abandon the metaphor, Charlie begins to think of the snow dome as a threat in itself. No longer does he imagine that his comfortable world has been shaken up. Instead, he begins to see the snow dome as a cage. In Chapter 7, he contemplates Laura's murder and resolves to break out of the snow dome with Jasper:
I know we won’t ever solve this. I guess I always knew. So I’ve got to crack open the snow dome. I’ve got to get out, get brave.
Because of Corrigan's culture of White supremacy, Charlie can only see two options if he stays there. He can tell Eliza what he knows about her sister's death and allow Jasper to become a scapegoat. Alternatively, he can protect Jasper by betraying Eliza. He holds all the power, and yet the scope of his power is limited by the fact that Corrigan will never believe the full truth—that Jasper found Laura's body but did not kill her. Charlie realizes that in order to live according to his own beliefs, he needs to break out of the Corrigan snow dome and into a world with greater capacity for complex narratives.
Related Themes:
Chapter 7
Explanation and Analysis—Loosen the Valve:
In Chapter 7, Charlie reveals what Eliza has told him about Laura's death. He introduces the frantic confession with a metaphor:
This is what Eliza tells me.
This is what happened.
And I’ve got to get it out quick, I’ve got to loosen the valve on it and let it go, fizzing and spraying, because it’s too hard, it’s too heavy, it’s too much. I can’t hold on to it for too long because it’ll burn.
Charlie has struggled for the entire novel under the weight of the secrets he is holding onto. He can't tell anyone what he knows for fear that people will suspect Jasper of killing Laura. The only outlet he has had is his writing. Every time there is a new development or a new piece of information, Charlie writes about it in the book that becomes this very novel. Eliza's confession is the biggest new development in the murder mystery since Jasper first brought Charlie to the clearing where Laura died. It reveals that Laura was not murdered after all, but also that her story is even more tragic than anyone suspected. Charlie compares the information Eliza has poured into him to a highly flammable substance that is growing heavier, hotter, and more pressurized the longer he holds it inside. He needs to write in order to "loosen the valve." He is not sure that he will let the substance out very neatly. The "fizzing and spraying" represents the way the whole story has grown too unwieldy for Charlie to control. He will do his best to narrate what he knows, but there is an extent to which the story will take on a life of its own.
This idea of writing as a kind of exorcism or release of trauma is common in Gothic literature. Charlie may be trying to imitate the writers he admires for effect. However, it seems more likely that he is genuinely using his writing for catharsis he doesn't know how to find anywhere else. Most of what he knows about the world comes from the books his father has offered him, many of which are Southern Gothic novels. These books have taught Charlie that feelings can be felt, processed, and released only when they are written about. In Charlie's hands, this literary trope is part art and part survival.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Fallen Kite:
In Chapter 1, Charlie uses a series of similes to describe what it is like to watch Laura's body fall into the river. One of the similes later turns into an important extended metaphor:
And it is sudden when she falls. Fast. Like a white kite spearing the ground, its tail lolling lazily behind. She folds and crumples. Like a doll. Like a bag of wet bones. With a soft, horrible thud when she meets the earth. A sound that reminds me that she’s just loose meat. And I guess I shouldn’t be, but I am shocked by her lifelessness.
Laura's fall reminds Charlie of the moment when a kite falls out of the sky and hits the ground, or the moment when a child drops a doll on the ground. While she is in the air, she is almost beautiful. She gives the same illusion of life that a child projects onto a kite in the air or a doll in their arms. The second she hits the ground, she turns lifeless. The thudding sound "reminds [Charlie] that she's just loose meat," a realization that is all the more distressing and "shocking" because of the temporary illusion of life during her fall. Charlie isn't sure yet how she died, but he is already thinking about culpability—his own and others'. Society has dropped Laura with the same lack of regard a child displays when they drop a doll they are bored of playing with.
It is the kite simile that sticks in Charlie's mind after this scene. He returns to it at the end of Chapter 7, when some neighborhood children finally manage to get a kite into the air:
It’s easy to imagine it…as though they’ve tied a long string to the foot of a hovering hawk, keeping it on a thin leash to feel what it is to fly. And you want to let it higher, you want to spool out your line and hold it, just for the thrill, to see how far it goes. But once it’s out of view, you want it back again, don’t you? …And you want to tie it to something permanent, put it in a cage at night.…But of course you can’t do that. Holding something doesn’t make it yours.
The kite is inanimate, but Charlie compares it to a live bird on which the children have a tenuous hold. The kite-bird becomes a metaphor for relationships. Laura died because her father wanted too much control over her and her body. He created a living being and then, by refusing to let her have her autonomy, he turned her into the "bag of bones" Charlie and Jasper pushed off the dam. Charlie realizes that he does not want to do the same to anyone else. He has not done anything nearly as abusive as Pete Wishart has, but he has spent most of the novel trying to make sure Eliza won't hate him for his involvement in Laura's death. He now understands that in so doing, he has kept Eliza "caged." As much as he wishes he could ensure that she will not betray or abandon him and Jasper, he understands that he cannot have a real relationship with her as long as it is not her clear-eyed choice. He chooses to let her fly free as a bird instead of pulling her to the ground like an inanimate kite.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Snow Dome:
Throughout the novel, Charlie sees his snow dome (what American readers might know as a snow globe) as a metaphor for the stifling effect Corrigan has on its residents. One instance of this motif occurs in Chapter 5, when Jasper talks about religion:
“Somethink else I could never understand,” he says, “is how people, ages ago, could look up at the moon and still reckon the world was flat. Flat, Charlie. See, that’s what I mean by people thinkin they’re the center of things....Everyone was convinced it was orbiting round them, not the other way round. It’s crazy. Like they were living in the middle of one of them snow domes. You know, the ones you’re supposed to shake up.”
Charlie's attention is piqued when Jasper mentions the snow dome because he has already been thinking that Laura's death has shaken up his world, as though he is at the center of a snow dome. Jasper's comparison (technically a simile) helps Charlie build out the metaphor of the snow dome. Charlie realizes that by imagining his world as a shaken up snow dome, he has been doing exactly what Jasper critiques in this speech: he has been placing himself at the center of the whole story.
Jasper does not have the luxury of believing the world revolves around him and his comfort. He has spent his life as an outsider, enduring the abuse and contempt of a majority-White town on account of his mixed-race background and neglectful single father. It is as though the White people of Corrigan believe they live in a bubble where everything is supposed to be picture-perfect and snow-white. They reject the idea that they are anchored to anything outside their insular community. People like Jasper and the Lu family are are targeted because they remind White residents that they are bound to a more complicated world that does not revolve around them. Charlie realizes that by thinking of Laura's death as something that has shaken his snow dome, he has reinforced the imaginary glass walls that White Corrigan residents weaponize against the people they see as threats.
Rather than abandon the metaphor, Charlie begins to think of the snow dome as a threat in itself. No longer does he imagine that his comfortable world has been shaken up. Instead, he begins to see the snow dome as a cage. In Chapter 7, he contemplates Laura's murder and resolves to break out of the snow dome with Jasper:
I know we won’t ever solve this. I guess I always knew. So I’ve got to crack open the snow dome. I’ve got to get out, get brave.
Because of Corrigan's culture of White supremacy, Charlie can only see two options if he stays there. He can tell Eliza what he knows about her sister's death and allow Jasper to become a scapegoat. Alternatively, he can protect Jasper by betraying Eliza. He holds all the power, and yet the scope of his power is limited by the fact that Corrigan will never believe the full truth—that Jasper found Laura's body but did not kill her. Charlie realizes that in order to live according to his own beliefs, he needs to break out of the Corrigan snow dome and into a world with greater capacity for complex narratives.
Related Themes:
Chapter 9
Explanation and Analysis—Volcano:
In Chapter 9, just when everyone is celebrating Charlie's triumph of stealing peaches from Mad Jack Lionel's yard, they see smoke in the distance. The smoke, which Charlie describes with vivid imagery, is both real and a metaphor:
A pillar of smoke, dense and dark. A volcano is erupting. It is distant, but not too distant. It looks to be perilously close to the town center. And there is a moment where we all quietly take it in, that single column, climbing and writhing straight up. There isn’t a breath of wind. And we pay it due regard. This is a dark spirit with substance. Everyone in Corrigan knows there is something real here, that this is something to truly be afraid of, that this kind of smoke holds fire at its heart.
The smoke is startlingly "dense and dark," indicating not a little, controlled fire but a violent, destructive one. The "erupting volcano" is actually the Wisharts' house. Eliza has set it on fire in an attempt to kill or at least seriously injure her father. The sight of a house on fire at the center of town is enough on its own to snare the attention of all the onlookers. Still, Charlie suggests that they are transfixed partly because they see the fire as a sign of something more. The image of still air without "a breath of wind" blends the conservative town's stagnant cultural atmosphere into the physical atmosphere. The column of smoke stands in the middle of everything, unable to be dispelled. It helps everyone see that metaphorically, Corrigan is suffocating on stale air.
Just as the smoke is a sign of fire, the fire is a sign of the thing that created it: family secrets, sexual abuse, and Eliza's vengeful anger in the aftermath of her sister's death. In all this drama, there is even a hint of vengeful racism on Laura's part—did she think about the fact that she was setting Jasper up for her murder? All of this is the "something real here" that everyone knows instinctively they ought "to truly be afraid of." When Charlie arrives on the scene of the fire, the Wishart house is still burning but has not fully burned down. Pete Wishart is badly injured, but he is still alive. The entire town has organized itself around this abusive man, who seems as stubborn and steadfast as the immovable column of smoke. The town pays him "due regard" by keeping him as shire president, even though it may even be an open secret by now that he has abused his child. Charlie runs toward the fire while everyone is still standing by, watching. He seems determined to break with Corrigan tradition, refusing to watch in silence while something terrible unfolds.
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