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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
Part 1
Explanation and Analysis—The Lawyer’s Reading:
During the final two years of the lawyer’s 15-year imprisonment in the garden wing of the banker’s house, he asks for a variety of different reading material. The narrator captures the unsettling nature of his requests using a simile:
Notes used to come from [the lawyer] in which he asked to be sent at the same time a book on chemistry, a text-book of medicine, a novel, and some treatise on philosophy or theology. He read as though he were swimming in the sea among the broken pieces of wreckage, and in his desire to save his life was eagerly grasping one piece after another.
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Part 2
Explanation and Analysis—Like an Envious Beggar:
Leading up to the lawyer’s release date, the banker starts to become very anxious as, over the course of the lawyer’s 15 years of imprisonment, the banker has lost most of his fortune. As the banker worries out loud to himself about the financial effects of losing the bet, he uses a simile:
Unlock with LitCharts A+“Why didn’t the man die? He’s only forty years old. He will take away my last farthing, marry, enjoy life, gamble on the Exchange, and I will look on like an envious beggar and hear the same words from him every day: ‘I’m obliged to you for the happiness of my life. Let me help you.’ No, it’s too much! The only escape from bankruptcy and disgrace—is that the man should die.”
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Explanation and Analysis—The Lawyer’s Lament:
In his final letter to the banker, the lawyer moves from listing all of the ways that literature helped him survive his imprisonment to condemning it, using three similes in the process:
Unlock with LitCharts A+“And I despise your books, despise all wordly blessings and wisdom. Everything is void, frail, visionary and delusive like a mirage. Though you be proud and wise and beautiful, yet will death wipe you from the face of the earth like the mice underground; and your posterity, your history, and the immortality of your men of genius will be as frozen slag, burnt down together with the terrestrial globe.”
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