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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
Book 1: Matchmaking
Explanation and Analysis—Creature:
In the following example of simile from Chapter 2, Desdemona imagines herself and Lefty as a "four-legged, two-headed creature":
Early on, the emotional sympathy she’d felt with Lefty had been so absolute that she’d sometimes forgotten they were separate people. As kids they’d scrabbled down the terraced mountainside like a four-legged, two-headed creature. She was accustomed to their Siamese shadow springing up against the whitewashed house at evening, and whenever she encountered her solitary outline, it seemed cut in half.
Related Themes:
Book 1: An Immodest Proposal
Explanation and Analysis—Resurfacing:
Toward the beginning of Chapter 3, Cal reflects on his current life in Berlin, utilizing simile to compare his past life as Callie to his present one:
Unlock with LitCharts A+I’ve lived more than half my life as a male, and by now everything comes naturally. When Calliope surfaces, she does so like a childhood speech impediment. Suddenly there she is again, doing a hair flip, or checking her nails. It’s a little like being possessed. Callie rises up inside me, wearing my skin like a loose robe. She sticks her little hands into the baggy sleeves of my arms.
Related Themes:
Book 1: The Silk Road
Explanation and Analysis—Winged Victory:
After Lefty and Desdemona marry in Chapter 4, they retreat inside a covered lifeboat that doubles as their marital bed. Lefty undresses her, realizing that Desdemona smuggled more than silkworms onboard: she wears their mother's corset under her clothes. In an example of both simile and allusion, Cal/lie compares her corset-clad grandmother to the famous Greek statue, Winged Victory of Samothrace:
Unlock with LitCharts A+In the lifeboat, the corset absorbed all available moonlight, with the odd result that Desdemona’s face, head, and arms disappeared. She looked like Winged Victory, tumbled on her back, being carted off to a conqueror’s museum. All that was missing was the wings.
Book 2: Henry Ford’s English-Language Melting Pot
Explanation and Analysis—Trees:
In the following example of imagery and simile, Cal/lie compares the exhaust stacks at the auto plant to a "grove of trees":
Unlock with LitCharts A+The main building, a fortress of dark brick, was seven stories high, the smokestacks seventeen. Running off it were two chutes topped by water towers. These led to observation decks and to adjoining refineries studded with less impressive stacks. It was like a grove of trees, as if the Rouge’s eight main smokestacks had sown seeds to the wind, and now ten or twenty or fifty smaller trunks were sprouting up in the infertile soil around the plant.
Related Themes:
