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
Part 1, Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—Shifting Similes:
In Chapter 3 of Part 1, Rushdie describes Saladin's integration with English society, including meeting his wife Pamela Lovelace. In his description of Pamela, Rushdie uses a sequence of similes to offer readers a glimpse of her character:
[...] and every moment she spent in the world was full of panic, so she smiled and smiled and maybe once a week she locked the door and shook and felt like a husk, like an empty peanut-shell, a monkey without a nut.
Related Themes:
Part 2
Explanation and Analysis—A Voice Like Sick:
In Part 2 of the novel, Rushdie uses a simile to describe how Mahound periodically ascends Mount Cone to speak with the Angel Gibreel. After relaying the supposed "Satanic Verses" to the people of Jahilia, Mahound returns to Mount Cone with an agenda: he wants Gibreel to convince him that he was duped by Shaitan last time he visited the mountain, and that Gibreel never authorized the inclusion of lesser goddesses in Mahound's faith. On Mount Cone, Mahound and Gibreel wrestle. Rushdie writes:
Unlock with LitCharts A+After they had wrestled for hours or even weeks Mahound was pinned down beneath the angel, it's what he wanted, it was his will filling me up and giving me the strength to hold him down, because archangels can't lose such fights, it wouldn't be right, it's only devils who get beaten in such circs, so the moment I got on top he started weeping for joy and then he did his old trick, forcing my mouth open and making the voice, the Voice, pour out of me once again, make it pour all over him, like sick.
Related Themes:
Part 4
Explanation and Analysis—Hopes Like Butterflies :
In Part 4, Ayesha is consistently surrounded by butterflies. Even when these insects are not near her, they symbolize and foreshadow her presence. An early example of this, which features a simile, occurs a few pages after Mirza Saeed first sees Ayesha eating butterflies in his garden:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The banyan's non-human inhabitants—honey ants, squirrels, owls—were accorded the respect due to fellow-citizens. Only the butterflies were ignored, like hopes long since shown to be false.
Part 7, Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—India and Laurasia:
Near the end of Chapter 1 of Part 7, Saladin uses a simile and a sequence of metaphors to foreshadow the fact he and Gibreel will soon meet once more:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Things are closing in on me. Gibreel was drifting towards him, like India when, having come unstuck from the Gondwanaland proto-continent, it floated toward Laurasia. (His processes of mind, he recognized absently, were coming up with some pretty strange associations.) When they collided, the force would hurl up Himalayas.—What is a mountain? An obstacle; a transcendence; above all, an effect.
Part 7, Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—A Garden of Fire:
At the climactic ending of Part 7, the Shaandaar Cafe burns down, and Gibreel saves Saladin from the fire. Rushdie uses elaborate visual imagery full of alliteration to describe the spread of the flames:
Unlock with LitCharts A+And now the buds are blossoming into bushes, they are climbing like creepers up the sides of the towers, they reach out towards their neighbors, forming hedges of multicolored flame. It is like watching a luminous garden, its growth accelerated many thousands of times, a garden blossoming, flourishing, becoming overgrown, tangled, becoming impenetrable, a garden of dense intertwined chimeras, rivaling in its own incandescent fashion the thornwood that sprang up around the palace of the sleeping beauty in another fairy-tale, long ago.
