In the quote below, Dr. Bull uses two similes to refer to Sunday, as he and the other detectives make their strange journey chasing after him:
“I’ve got it now,” cried Bull, “it was because he was so fat and so light. Just like a balloon. We always think of fat people as heavy, but he could have danced against a sylph. I see now what I mean. Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity. It was like the old speculations—what would happen if an elephant could leap up in the sky like a grasshopper?”
“Our elephant,” said Syme, looking upwards, “has leapt into the sky like a grasshopper.”
First, Dr. Bull likens Sunday to a balloon (much like the hot air balloon Sunday is riding away on), then to an elephant leaping around like a grasshopper (a simile within a simile!). Both similes create vivid yet disparate images of Sunday for the reader, demonstrating his inability to be quantified by any one description alone. Sunday’s impossibility, his illegibility, and his intangibility are further evidence of his greater purpose in the novel: to inspire the detectives to seek out order and goodness in the vast, chaotic unknown. These images are also consistent with the absurdism and surrealism that increases as the novel progresses. Dr. Bull’s similes are both ridiculous and yet not at all out of place given the strangeness of everything else that has occurred and will continue to occur as the detectives reach the heavenly realm in Chapter 15.
