Previous
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 Snow Falling on Cedars
Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis—Child's Balloon:
This moment appears in a flashback to Ishmael’s childhood as he observes his father at work in the pressroom. Guterson uses hyperbole, visual imagery, tactile imagery, and simile in this scene to show Arthur’s darkly casual attitude to the dangers of his profession:
Arthur, who had formed over the years a symbiotic relationship with the machine, ducked in and out inspecting the plates and printing cylinders. He stood mere inches from the clattering rollers, seemingly oblivious to the fact that, as he’d explained to his son, were he caught by a sleeve he’d be instantly popped open like a child’s balloon and splattered across the walls. Even his bones would disappear, this was part of Arthur’s warning, until somebody found them scattered among the stained newsprint on the floor, looking like strips of white confetti.
Related Themes:
Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis—Gory Details:
Guterson uses simile, visual imagery, and gruesome tactile imagery in the following passage to show Horace performing an autopsy on Carl Heine with graphic precision:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Horace inserted a razor into one of his scalpels and poked it into the deceased’s head. He pressed the razor to the bone and guided it through the hair, describing an arc across the top of the deceased’s skull literally from ear to ear. It was a skillful and steady incision, like drawing a curved line with a pencil across the crown of the head, a fluid and graceful curve. In this manner he was able to peel back the dead man’s face as though it were the skin of a grapefruit or an orange and turn his forehead inside out so that it rested against his nose.
Related Themes:
Chapter 7
Explanation and Analysis—Etiquette Lessons:
This moment appears in a flashback to Hatsue’s youth during one of her etiquette lessons with Mrs. Shigemura. Guterson uses flashback and simile in this scene to show how Mrs. Shigemura teaches Hatsue to treat her hair as a tool:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Mrs. Shigemura lifted Hatsue’s hair in her palms and said its consistency reminded her of mercury and that Hatsue should learn to play her hair lovingly, like a stringed musical instrument or a flute. Then she combed it down Hatsue’s back until it lay opened like a fan and shimmered in unearthly black waves.
Related Themes:
Chapter 8
Explanation and Analysis—Horrible Scarecrow:
This memory appears in a brief flashback to Ishmael's boyhood, where he is doing yardwork to earn money. Guterson uses visual imagery and a simile to portray Mr. Gatewood, Ishmael’s neighbor, as a creepy, frail figure:
Unlock with LitCharts A+In the fall he burned brush piles and raked leaves for Virginia Gatewood, a stick figure at twilight in cloth gloves and a threadbare mackinaw coat ragged at the elbows. The veins in his cheeks were broken and smashed flat and appeared as a sort of blue paste beneath his skin; his Adam’s apple bulged like a toad’s. He looked, to Ishmael, vaguely like an alcoholic scarecrow.
Related Themes:
Chapter 14
Explanation and Analysis—Pain and Winter:
Hatsue’s mother never tried to conceal from her children that their lives would contain difficulties as well as happiness. Guterson uses a simile here to explore Fujiko’s belief that pain and hardship cannot be separated from life:
Unlock with LitCharts A+To deny that there was this dark side to life would be like pretending that the cold of winter was somehow only a temporary illusion, a way station on the way to the higher “reality” of long, warm, pleasant summers. But summer, it turned out, was no more real than the snow that melted in wintertime.
Related Themes:
Chapter 17
Explanation and Analysis—Swallowed the Snow:
As San Piedro braces for an incoming snowstorm before Kabuo’s trial, Guterson uses a simile in this passage to demonstrate how the islanders accept their powerlessness in the face of overwhelming natural forces:
Unlock with LitCharts A+If disaster, so be it, they said to themselves. There was nothing to be done except what could be done. The rest -- like the salt water around them, which swallowed the snow without effort, remaining what it was implacably -- was out of their hands, beyond.
Related Themes:
