The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: Similes 3 key examples

The simile—Cornelia’s voice staggered and bumped like a cart on a bad road—introduces the emotional and cognitive disruption Granny experiences. Cornelia’s voice, distorted by Granny’s fading perception, becomes not just a source of irritation but an emblem of jarring, directionless motion. The simile suggests that communication has broken down: Cornelia’s words do not soothe or reach Granny but rather lurch, loop, and ultimately “arrive nowhere.” This feeling of misalignment mirrors Granny’s deeper sense of alienation from the world around her as her mind slips further from clarity.

From there, the narrative unfolds into a surreal extended metaphor. Granny imagines herself stepping into the cart, reaching for the reins, only to find someone else already driving. This shift dramatizes her gradual surrender of control. The reins—long a symbol of autonomy, labor, and survival in Granny’s life—are no longer hers to hold. The metaphor reframes death not as erasure, but as travel: an inevitable passage, one she both resists and feels drawn toward. The man beside her, unnamed but recognized by his hands, suggests intimacy without certainty. He may be her late husband, a divine figure, or the embodiment of death itself. His presence offers comfort, but it also underscores the ultimate relinquishing of self-governance.

The final image elevates this metaphor into a kind of spiritual crescendo. The trees leaned over and bowed and a thousand birds sang a Mass, a striking blend of visual and auditory metaphor that casts Granny’s death not as quiet dissolution but as a sacred ceremony. The natural world acknowledges her, honors her. The metaphor invokes ritual without religion, transcendence without doctrine. Granny may not receive the sign from God she hoped for, but nature—rich with grace and gesture—provides its own kind of answer.

Together, these figurative devices embody the story’s central paradox: death is both an unraveling and a reckoning. Through simile, Porter evokes the friction and fear of a mind loosening from the world; through metaphor, she transforms that confusion into something sacred. The figurative language doesn’t just describe death—it enacts its gradual, mysterious pull. The effect is less about clarity and more about emotional truth: Granny is leaving, not suddenly, but in waves and in her own language.

Here, Granny’s soul is likened to a teething baby: fragile, irritable, and in need of soothing. The comparison, spoken through the priest’s perspective, reduces Granny to a state of spiritual dependency. For someone who has built her life around competence, control, and caretaking, this simile is quietly humiliating. It suggests that, in the eyes of others, she is no longer self-sufficient—not even in matters of the soul.

The moment stings because it flips Granny’s identity on its head. She has spent her life tending to others. Now, to be treated like a child is to be stripped of dignity in her final hours. The simile taps into a deeper anxiety that threads through the story: the fear of losing authority over one’s own body, mind, and narrative.

Yet there’s a gentler reading, too. Babies teethe because they are growing, and their discomfort is part of a natural transition. Seen this way, the simile casts death not as a defeat, but as a kind of developmental passage, one that requires pain to move through. Granny brushes it off (“Granny felt easy about her soul”), but the language betrays her. The very need to soothe implies unrest. In the end, the simile captures the uneasy process of letting go of the body, the ego, and the illusion of control.

This sentence is rich with literary devices. First, the fog is personified: it “marches,” “swallows,” and “moves,” suggesting intent and momentum. Rather than a passive weather phenomenon, the fog takes on an almost conscious presence, silently encroaching on Granny’s world. The use of the simile “like an army of ghosts” transforms it into something even more unsettling: a spectral force that recalls the dead, the past, and the inevitability of what’s coming. The image evokes both the literal approach of nightfall and the more abstract arrival of death.

The quote is especially powerful in context. Just before this moment, Granny is mentally making plans for tomorrow—what chores to do, what letters to burn, what still needs to be said. She’s still clinging to the illusion of continuity and control. But then she forgets what she was thinking, and the narrative shifts to this image of the fog. The juxtaposition creates a stark contrast between Granny’s imagined future and the very real, creeping present. The fog not only symbolize deaths, but it also mirrors her failing mind that is slowly becoming clouded and disoriented.

On a structural level, this moment functions as a turning point. Up until now, Granny has resisted the idea that she is dying. The imagery signals that resistance beginning to dissolve. The natural world becomes a reflection of Granny’s internal state: the hill becomes her consciousness, the fog her forgetfulness and mortality. The personified fog invades both landscape and mind, creating a layered symbolic representation of how death overtakes not only the body but also memory and self-awareness.

This visual also affects the reader’s experience. By describing the fog as something marching “like an army of ghosts,” Porter invites the reader into the scene, not just to witness Granny’s final moments but to feel them. The tension rises not because of dramatic action, but because of the quiet power of the image. The fog doesn’t rush—it creeps, surrounds, and eventually consumes. Its movement is inevitable, just like Granny’s death. Through this poetic use of personification and simile, Porter turns a natural image into something deeply emotional. The fog becomes a metaphor for memory, aging, and death—forces that arrive slowly, silently, and finally.