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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 1
Explanation and Analysis—Skull-Like:
Early in Chapter 1, Golding uses personification, simile, and foreshadowing to describe Ralph's exploration of the island:
Then he leapt back on the terrace, pulled off his shirt, and stood there among the skull-like coconuts with green shadows from the palms and the forest sliding over his skin.
Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Forest Fire:
During Chapter 2, after discovering Piggy's glasses can be used to spark a flame, the boys accidentally set a forest fire. The passage makes heavy use of figurative language:
Unlock with LitCharts A+One patch touched a tree trunk and scrambled up like a bright squirrel. The smoke increased, sifted, rolled outwards. The squirrel leapt on the wings of the wind and clung to another standing tree, eating downwards. Beneath the dark canopy of leaves and smoke the fire laid hold on the forest and began to gnaw. Acres of black and yellow smoke rolled steadily toward the sea. […] The flames, as though they were a kind of wild life, crept as a jaguar creeps on its belly toward a line of birch-like saplings that fledged an outcrop of the pink rock. They flapped at the first of the trees, and the branches grew a brief foliage of fire. The heart of flame leapt nimbly across the gap between the trees and then went swinging and flaring along the whole row of them.
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Explanation and Analysis—Great Beard of Flame:
In chapter two, the boys successfully make a fire for the first time, and several literary devices are used to describe it:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The pile was so rotten, and now so tinder-dry, that whole limbs yielded passionately to the yellow flames that poured upwards and shook a great beard of flame twenty feet in the air. For yards round the fire the heat was like a blow, and the breeze was a river of sparks. Trunks crumbled to white dust.
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Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—Jack the Hunter:
In Chapter 3, Jack tries to track down pigs to hunt, and the narrator uses similes to describe the action:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Jack was bent double. He was down like a sprinter, his nose only a few inches from the humid earth. The tree trunks and the creepers that festooned them lost themselves in a green dusk thirty feet above him, and all about was the undergrowth. There was only the faintest indication of a trail here; a cracked twig and what might be the impression of one side of a hoof. He lowered his chin and stared at the traces as though he would force them to speak to him. Then dog-like, uncomfortably on all fours yet unheeding his discomfort, he stole forward five yards and stopped.
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Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis—A Long Satisfying Drink:
In Chapter 4, Jack and his hunters kill a pig instead of keeping the fire lit as Ralph had asked. As Ralph yells at Jack for abandoning his post, Jack doesn't listen. The passage uses both metaphor and simile:
Unlock with LitCharts A+His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.
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Explanation and Analysis—Mirage:
In Chapter 4, a beautiful and weird description of the mirages the boys see on the island uses imagery and simile:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Strange things happened at midday. The glittering sea rose up, moved apart in planes of blatant impossibility; the coral reef and the few stunted palms that clung to the more elevated parts would float up into the sky, would quiver, be plucked apart, run like raindrops on a wire or be repeated as in an odd succession of mirrors. Sometimes land loomed where there was no land and flicked out like a bubble as the children watched. Piggy discounted all this learnedly as a “mirage” and since no boy could reach even the reef over the stretch of water where the snapping sharks waited, they grew accustomed to these mysteries and ignored them, just as they ignored the miraculous, throbbing stars. At midday the illusions merged into the sky and there the sun gazed down like an angry eye.
Chapter 6
Explanation and Analysis—The Ocean Leviathan:
In Chapter 6, Ralph looks out at the ocean while exploring Castle Rock, and the narrator uses a variety of literary devices to describe it:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Now he saw the landsman’s view of the swell and it seemed like the breathing of some stupendous creature. Slowly the waters sank among the rocks, revealing pink tables of granite, strange growths of coral, polyp, and weed. Down, down, the waters went, whispering like the wind among the heads of the forest. There was one flat rock there, spread like a table, and the waters sucking down on the four weedy sides made them seem like cliffs. Then the sleeping leviathan breathed out, the waters rose, the weed streamed, and the water boiled over the table rock with a roar. There was no sense of the passage of waves; only this minute-long fall and rise and fall.
Chapter 9
Explanation and Analysis—Authority:
In Chapter 9, during a feast that Jack uses to undermine Ralph's authority and sway boys to his tribe, Jack is described using metaphor, personification, and simile:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Power lay in the brown swell of his forearms: authority sat on his shoulder and chattered in his ear like an ape.
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Chapter 12
Explanation and Analysis—Forest Fire:
During Chapter 2, after discovering Piggy's glasses can be used to spark a flame, the boys accidentally set a forest fire. The passage makes heavy use of figurative language:
Unlock with LitCharts A+One patch touched a tree trunk and scrambled up like a bright squirrel. The smoke increased, sifted, rolled outwards. The squirrel leapt on the wings of the wind and clung to another standing tree, eating downwards. Beneath the dark canopy of leaves and smoke the fire laid hold on the forest and began to gnaw. Acres of black and yellow smoke rolled steadily toward the sea. […] The flames, as though they were a kind of wild life, crept as a jaguar creeps on its belly toward a line of birch-like saplings that fledged an outcrop of the pink rock. They flapped at the first of the trees, and the branches grew a brief foliage of fire. The heart of flame leapt nimbly across the gap between the trees and then went swinging and flaring along the whole row of them.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—The Pig's Skull:
In Chapter 12, while roaming the jungle, Ralph sees the pig skull Simon had been communicating with earlier. The narrator uses imagery, personification, and simile to describe this moment:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Ralph nearly flung himself behind a tree when he saw something standing in the center; but then he saw that the white face was bone and that the pig’s skull grinned at him from the top of a stick. He […] looked steadily at the skull that gleamed as white as ever the conch had done and seemed to jeer at him cynically. An inquisitive ant was busy in one of the eye sockets but otherwise the thing was lifeless. Or was it? Little prickles of sensation ran up and down his back. He stood, the skull about on a level with his face, and held up his hair with two hands. The teeth grinned, the empty sockets seemed to hold his gaze masterfully and without effort. What was it? The skull regarded Ralph like one who knows all the answers and won’t tell.
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Explanation and Analysis—The Cry of a Bird:
In Chapter 12, Ralph hides from Jack's tribe, who are hunting him. He hears the other boys whoop and call as they search for him, the narrator using a simile:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The cry swept by him across the narrow end of the island from sea to lagoon, like the cry of a flying bird.
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