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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
Part 1, Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Country Eyes:
In the first chapter of Part One, Sal meets Dean and his wife, Marylou, whom he describes with imagery and similes:
Marylou was a pretty blonde with immense ringlets of hair like a sea of golden tresses; she sat there on the edge of the couch with her hands hanging in her lap and her smoky blue country eyes fixed in a wide stare because she was in an evil gray New York pad that she'd heard about back West, and waiting like a longbodied emaciated Modigliani surrealist woman in a serious room.
Part 1, Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis—An Arrow:
In Part 1, Chapter 4, Sal describes hitchhiking to Denver on a truck driven by two young, cheerful farmers. His use of imagery makes the road life more vivid for the reader and establishes the carefree mood that characterizes the best moments of his journeys. He also uses a simile to describe his elation.
Unlock with LitCharts A+The road changed too: humpy in the middle, with soft shoulders and a ditch on both sides about four feet deep, so the truck bounced and teetered from one side of the road to the other [...] How that truck disposed of the Nebraska nub—the nub that sticks out over Colorado! [...] The great blazing stars came out, the far-receding sand hills got dim. I felt like an arrow that could shoot out all the way.
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Part 1, Chapter 8
Explanation and Analysis—Stop the Machine:
In Part 1, Chapter 8, Sal tries to sleep, but Dean and Carlo's extended conversation on philosophy keeps him awake. Dean and Carlo metaphorically call their talking a "machine," and Sal plays with this characterization, turning it into a simile:
Unlock with LitCharts A+"Stop the machine," I said. They looked at me.
"He's been awake all this time, listening. What were you thinking, Sal?" I told them that I was thinking they were very amazing maniacs and that I had spent the whole night listening to them like a man watching the mechanism of a watch that reached clear to the top of Berthoud Pass and yet was made with the smallest works of the most delicate watch in the world.
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Part 1, Chapter 11
Explanation and Analysis—My American Continent:
When Sal climbs a mountain in San Francisco, toward the end of Chapter 11 of Part 1, he describes what he sees with personification, imagery, and metaphorical language.
Unlock with LitCharts A+And before me was the great raw bulge and bulk of my American continent; somewhere far across, gloomy, crazy New York was throwing up its cloud of dust and brown steam. There is something brown and holy about the East; and California is white like washlines and emptyheaded—at least that's what I thought then.
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Part 1, Chapter 12
Explanation and Analysis—Teresa:
In Chapter 12 of Part 1, Sal describes his lover Teresa's body with similes, and he uses additional metaphorical language to characterize their time together.
Unlock with LitCharts A+In reverent and sweet little silence [Teresa] took all her clothes off and slipped her tiny body into the sheets with me. It was brown as grapes. I saw her poor belly where there was a Caesarian scar; her hips were so narrow she couldn't bear a child without getting gashed open. Her legs were like little sticks. [...] Then, two tired angels of some kind, hung-up forlornly in an LA shelf, having found the closest and most delicious thing in life together, we fell asleep and slept till late afternoon.
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Part 2, Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis—Rollo Greb:
In Chapter 4 of Part 2, Sal goes to a party thrown by a man named Rollo Greb, whom he describes with an allusion and metaphorical language.
Unlock with LitCharts A+[Greb] played Verdi operas and pantomimed them in his pajamas with a great rip down the back. He didn't give a damn about anything. He is a great scholar who goes reeling down the New York waterfront with original seventeenth-century musical manuscripts under his arm, shouting. He crawls like a big spider through the streets. His excitement blew out of his eyes in stabs of fiendish light. He rolled his neck in spastic ecstasy.
Part 2, Chapter 8
Explanation and Analysis—Fruitless Love:
In Chapter 8 of Part 2, Sal uses metaphorical language to describe how Marylou looks at Dean:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Marylou was watching Dean as she had watched him clear across the country and back, out of the corner of her eye—with a sullen, sad air, as though she wanted to cut off his head and hide it in her closet, an envious and rueful love of him so amazingly himself, all raging and sniffy and crazy-wayed, a smile of tender dotage but also sinister envy that frightened me about her, a love she knew would never bear fruit [...]
Part 2, Chapter 10
Explanation and Analysis—Rebirth:
In Chapter 10 of Part 2, Sal is lonely and delirious with hunger. While roaming the streets, he has a transcendental experience that he describes with similes.
Unlock with LitCharts A+I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times [...] I realized it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein [...]
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Part 3, Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Evil Angel:
In the second chapter of Part 3, Sal goes to Dean's house. Sal metaphorically describes himself as an angel, come to spirit Dean away on an adventure.
Unlock with LitCharts A+My arrival was somewhat like the coming of the strange most evil angel in the home of the snow-white fleece, as Dean and I began talking excitedly in the kitchen downstairs, which brought forth sobs from upstairs. [...] Camille knew what was going to happen. Apparently Dean had been quiet for a few months; now the angel had arrived and he was going mad again.
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Part 3, Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis—Jazz:
In Chapter 4 of Part 3, Sal and Dean go to a jazz club. Kerouac's descriptions of jazz music are remarkably inventive, and this one is no exception. He uses similes and imagery to help the reader imagine the noise and energy of the crowd.
Unlock with LitCharts A+His tone was clear as a bell, high, pure, and blew straight in our faces from two feet away. Dean stood in front of him, oblivious to everything else in the world, with his head bowed, his hands socking in together, his whole body jumping on his heels and the sweat, always the sweat, pouring and splashing down his tormented collar to lie actually in a pool at his feet.
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Part 3, Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis—Jazz:
In Chapter 4 of Part 3, Sal and Dean go to a jazz club. Kerouac's descriptions of jazz music are remarkably inventive, and this one is no exception. He uses similes and imagery to help the reader imagine the noise and energy of the crowd.
Unlock with LitCharts A+His tone was clear as a bell, high, pure, and blew straight in our faces from two feet away. Dean stood in front of him, oblivious to everything else in the world, with his head bowed, his hands socking in together, his whole body jumping on his heels and the sweat, always the sweat, pouring and splashing down his tormented collar to lie actually in a pool at his feet.
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Part 3, Chapter 8
Explanation and Analysis—Fast Car:
In Chapter 8 of Part 3, Sal describes Dean's maniacal driving with two similes.
Unlock with LitCharts A+[The hitchhikers] were hardly seated, and I had hardly waved good-by to Denver, before [Dean] was off, the big motor thrumming with immense birdlike power. [...] It didn't seem like we were even going seventy but all the cars fell from us like dead flies on the straightaway highway leading up to Greeley.
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Part 3, Chapter 9
Explanation and Analysis—Angel of Terror:
Sal describes yet more of Dean's skilled but irresponsibly fast driving in Chapter 9 of Part 3. His description involves a simile, a metaphor, and precise verbs that allow the reader to imagine Dean's eager yet deliberate maneuvers.
Unlock with LitCharts A+Dean came up on lines of cars like the Angel of Terror. He almost rammed them along as he looked for an opening. He teased their bumpers, he eased and pushed and craned around to see the curve, then the huge car leaped to his touch and passed, and always by a hair we made it back to our side as other lines filed by in the opposite direction and I shuddered. I couldn't take it any more.
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Part 3, Chapter 11
Explanation and Analysis—Traveling Salesman:
In Chapter 11 of Part 3, Sal's descriptions of his travels become melancholy. This tone is communicated with a simile in which Sal compares himself to a traveling salesman who sells something no one wants to buy.
Unlock with LitCharts A+In the misty night we crossed Toledo and went onward across old Ohio. I realized I was beginning to cross and recross towns in America as though I were a traveling salesman—raggedy travelings, bad stock, rotten beans in the bottom of my bag of tricks, nobody buying.
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Part 4, Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis—Monterrey:
Dean, Sal, and Stan keep driving through Mexico. In Chapter 5 of Part 4, they reach Monterrey. Sal describes this leg of the journey with imagery and a simile.
Unlock with LitCharts A+We met nobody on this high road. It wound among the clouds and took us to the great plateau on top. Across this plateau the big manufacturing town of Monterrey sent smoke to the blue skies with their enormous Gulf clouds written across the bowl of day like fleece.
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