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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 The Bell Jar
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Like a Numb Trolleybus:
Reflecting upon what she regards as the failure of her time in New York City, Esther uses a series of similes related to cars and automobiles:
Look what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car. Only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus.
Explanation and Analysis—The Cadaver:
Reflecting upon her own ongoing fixation with the Rosenbergs, who were convicted of committing espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union, Esther uses a simile that compares her obsession with their trial and execution to a past incident in which she saw a dead body:
Unlock with LitCharts A+I kept hearing about the Rosenbergs over the radio and at the office till I couldn’t get them out of my mind. It was like the first time I saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward, the cadaver’s head—or what there was left of it—floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and behind the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadaver’s head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.
Chapter 7
Explanation and Analysis—Like a Racehorse :
Esther uses a series of similes to explain her own feelings of inadequacy while living and working in New York City:
Unlock with LitCharts A+For the first time in my life [...] I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it. The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end. I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.
Related Themes:
Chapter 15
Explanation and Analysis—Like a Squirrel :
When Esther first arrives in the mental health care facility operated by the kind female psychiatrist, Doctor Nolan, she uses a metaphor, presenting herself as a squirrel:
Unlock with LitCharts A+A maid in a green uniform was setting the tables for supper. There were white linen tablecloths and glasses and paper napkins. I stored the fact that there were real glasses in the corner of my mind the way a squirrel stores a nut. At the city hospital we had drunk out of paper cups and had no knives to cut our meat. The meat had always been so overcooked we could cut it with a fork.
Related Themes:
Chapter 18
Explanation and Analysis—Like a Martian:
At Doctor Nolan’s facility, Esther meets Joan, who previously dated Buddy but is implied in the novel to be a lesbian. Esther uses a series of similes that underscore her difficulty in understanding Joan despite their similar backgrounds and shared experiences of mental illness:
Unlock with LitCharts A+In spite of the creepy feeling, and in spite of my old, ingrained dislike, Joan fascinated me. It was like observing a Martian, or a particularly warty toad. Her thoughts were not my thoughts, nor her feelings my feelings, but we were close enough so that her thoughts and feelings seemed a wry, black image of my own. Sometimes I wondered if I had made Joan up. Other times I wondered if she would continue to pop in at every crisis of my life to remind me of what I had been [...]
