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Setting
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
Key Examples in Pale Horse, Pale Rider
Similes
Explanation and Analysis—City Editors:
Porter uses dramatic irony and simile to undercut surface appearances and reveal characters as shaped by cultural performance. One such example occurs in Miranda’s observation of her editor Bill:
Bill had been raging about, chewing his half-smoked cigar, his hair standing up in a brush, his eyes soft and lambent but wild, like a stag’s. He would never, thought Miranda, be more than fourteen years old if he lived for a century, which he would not, at the rate he was going. He behaved exactly like city editors in the moving pictures, even to the chewed cigar. Had he formed his style on the films, or had scenario writers seized once for all on the type Bill in its inarguable purity?
Explanation and Analysis—Pictures of a Place:
Adam’s offhand comment about his expectations for war includes a quietly disillusioned simile that reveals how thoroughly mediated his understanding of the conflict has become:
Unlock with LitCharts A+I don’t know a darned thing about it, really, but they make it sound awfully messy. I’ve heard so much about it I feel as if I had been there and back. It’s going to be an anticlimax [...] like seeing the pictures of a place so often you can’t see it at all when you actually get there. Seems to me I’ve been in the army all my life.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Olive and Tan:
Porter uses rich imagery and a subtle simile in this passage to deepen Miranda’s emotional perception of Adam and to foreshadow the darkness that lies ahead in Pale Horse, Pale Rider:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Miranda smiled at him gaily because she was always delighted at the sight of him. He was wearing his new uniform, and he was all olive and tan and tawny, hay colored and sand colored from hair to boots. She half noticed again that he always began by smiling at her; that his smile faded gradually; that his eyes became fixed and thoughtful as if he were reading in a poor light.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—The Fishing Line:
In a rare moment of reflective stillness, Miranda recalls her affection for the quiet of early morning:
Unlock with LitCharts A+How I have loved this house in the morning before we are all awake and tangled together like badly cast fishing lines.
Related Themes:
