When Aronnax finds himself trapped in an unknown submarine and handled roughly by masked men (who turn out to be part of Captain Nemo’s crew), he uses a simile to express his outrage:
“By the pluck!” he fumed. “Here are people as badly off as the Scotch for hospitality. They are gentle as cannibals. And I shouldn’t be surprised if they were man-eaters. But I’ll be right there when they start to swallow me.”
By comparing the men to “cannibals,” Aronnax shows how flustered and frustrated he is by this situation. His comment that they are “as gentle as cannibals” is also an example of verbal irony—he is sarcastically commenting on how they are the very opposite of gentle.
This language also highlights Aronnax’s familiarity with the ideology of colonizers. At this period in time, Europeans would justify their imperialist inclinations by perpetuating the idea that indigenous people around the globe were nothing more than “cannibals” and “savages” (language that Aronnax goes on to use to describe the Papuan people with whom he comes in contact). With this simile Aronnax displays a lack of self-reflection—it was he and his crewmates who hunted down the Nautilus, after all, and attacked it first. If anyone could be compared to cannibals (or other violent descriptions), it should be them.
After being aboard the Nautilus for several months, Aronnax uses a simile to compare his and his companions’ fate to that of snails:
So we progressed, incessantly charmed by some new marvel. Conseil arranged and classed his zoophytes, his articulate, his molluscs, his fishes. The days passed rapidly away, and I took no account of them. Ned, according to habit, tried to vary the diet on board. Like snails, we were fixed to our shells, and I declare it is easy to lead a snail’s life.
This analogy shows how Aronnax is ambivalent about his position on the submarine—like a snail’s shell, the vessel both confines him and also protects him, becoming a sort of home.
Unlike Ned who is consistently trying to escape (which becomes clear in future chapters), Aronnax seems to fall on the side of enjoying his “shell;” as he writes, “it is easy to lead a snail’s life.” Still, this simile encourages readers to decide for themselves whether the Nautilus offers freedom or constraint for the prisoners on board. While Aronnax may find it easy to forget about his position as a prisoner, readers can’t help but question what will happen when he runs out of “new marvels” to charm him.
When the Nautilus ends up stuck on an ice bed and puts Captain Nemo, Aronnax, and the whole crew in grave danger, they decide to push the submarine to its maximum speed to get out. In this moment, Arronax uses a pair of similes to describe the experience of watching the ice pass by at such a speed:
Here and there were opal shades of wonderful softness, running through bright spots like diamonds of fire, the brilliancy of which the eye could not bear. The power of the lantern seemed increased a hundredfold, like a lamp through the lenticular plates of a first-class lighthouse.
In comparing the bright ice spots to “diamonds of fire” and their electrical lantern to the lamp in a “first-class lighthouse,” Aronnax captures the beauty and drama of this scene. Aronnax’s poetic language helps readers understand why he has chosen to stay on the Nautilus and enjoys underwater exploration so much—it’s for moments like these of witnessing the magic of the sea.
That said, “diamonds of fire” is also a slightly unsettling phrase, and the fact that Aronnax’s eyes can hardly bear to see them shows that this is not a calm and reflective moment with nature. Together, the similes communicate that nature is at once beautiful and also deeply threatening. This ends up proving to be true later in the chapter, when the crew is almost unable to make it out of the ice trap.
