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Metaphor
Explanation and Analysis—Colonized:
While driving to Whiskey to find Booker, Bride thinks about their relationship. The narrative uses a somewhat unexpected metaphor to characterize their bond and its impact on Bride:
The reason for this tracking was not love, she knew; it was more hurt than anger that made her drive into unknown territory to locate the one person she once trusted, who made her feel safe, colonized somehow. Without him the world was more than confusing—shallow, cold, deliberatly hostile. Like the atmosphere in her mother's house where she never knew the right thing to say or remember what the rules were.
This passage makes clear that, when they were together, Booker made Bride "feel safe, colonized somehow." This metaphor is somewhat situationally ironic, considering that colonization isn't usually seen as a good thing. To the contrary, one would expect Bride to dislike the fact that she feels "colonized" by Booker, since it would suggest that he has impinged upon her sense of personal agency. Nonetheless, though, she indicates that she feels "safe" because of his colonizing influence, thus illustrating how close she feels to Booker—so close, it seems, that she actively likes the extent to which he is (or was, when they were in a relationship) tangled up in her life.
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