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Metaphor
Explanation and Analysis—I Held My Life:
In Chapter 13, Richard begins to read from the library extensively. In the meantime, Richard's brother and mother have moved to Memphis to live with him. In his library books, Richard reads about a world that he never knew and metaphorically expresses that his existence will always be precarious:
What, then, was there? I held my life in my mind, in my consciousness each day, feeling at times that I would stumble and drop it, spill it forever. My reading had created a vast sense of distance between me and the world in which I lived and tried to make a living, and that sense of distance was increasing each day. My days and nights were one long, quiet, continuously contained dream of terror, tension, and anxiety. I wondered how long I could bear it.
Richard lays out three separate metaphors that describe his feelings about this situation. First, Richard characterizes his life as a physical thing he could "hold" in his mind and try to keep safe. But he understands that his life is fragile and can break if he loses focus, ascribing more physical characteristics to his "life." This correlates to the real physical danger that Richard constantly battles in the novel. He is literally correct in saying that if he loses focus, his life could indeed come into physical peril, as if someone had stumbled and dropped it.
In the second metaphor, Richard describes how his new knowledge results in "a vast sense of distance between me and the world." Here he is considering a separate issue—not his physical life per se, but what he has learned from reading. But like the first metaphor, this one too relates to Richard's real life, in which he has moved around constantly, creating a similar kind of distance.
Then, the third metaphor characterizes his life as a "dream," a far less physical concept than the first sentence. These metaphors clarify an important distinction: Richard sees his life as a physical object that he has to protect, but sees the structures of racism that control his life as an ethereal object (which is still full of "terror, tension, and anxiety"). Despite all these metaphors, the passage ends with the practical question that Richard has had to consider throughout the memoir: "I wondered how long I could bear it."
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