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Metaphor
Explanation and Analysis—Underwater:
In the years after the bombing, the Swede obsessively reads and watches the news to find out where Merry and Rita Cohen might be. In Chapter 4, a metaphor captures his helplessness in the midst of this information overload. No matter how closely he follows the news, he doesn't get any closer to knowing where his daughter is.
Toward the end of Chapter 4, the narrator describes the Swede's fixation on a bomb blast which takes place in Greenwich Village two years after Merry's disappearance. To begin with, the Swede is convinced that the two young women who were seen stumbling out of the building are Merry and Rita. Even when he accepts that this is unlikely, he remains fixated on the women.
Reading about the women's parents in the newspaper, he relates to the "uncommunicativeness" of one of the fathers and knows how much "emotional anguish" lies beneath it. Roth uses a metaphor to capture the Swede's emotions and the emotions he imagines the parents to be dealing with: "he knows the truth is that the missing girl's parents are drowning exactly as he is, drowning day and night in inadequate explanations." In this metaphor, the Swede's distress becomes a physical sensation. Inundated with information that doesn't lead anywhere, he he feels as though he's drowning.
Later in the same chapter, another figurative image likens the Swede's experience of being overwhelmed to being submerged in water. As the narrator continues to describe the Swede's coping strategies after Merry's disappearance, his obsession with the news gives way to an obsession with Angela Davis. Because he thinks he remembers finding something written by Davis in Merry's room shortly before the bombing, he believes "that Angela Davis can get him to his daughter."
Yes, now he remembers clearly sitting at Merry's desk trying to read Angela Davis himself, working at it, wondering how his child did it, thinking, Reading this stuff is like deep-sea diving. It's like being in an Aqua-Lung with the window right up against your face and the air in your mouth and no place to go, no place to move, no place to put a crowbar and escape.
In this passage, a simile captures the Swede's experience trying to read a text by Angela Davis. By comparing this experience to deep-sea diving in an Aqua-Lung, Roth illustrates how stifling and intense the Swede finds Davis's prose. While many people find the urgency and energy of her writing engaging to the point of liberating, the Swede finds it claustrophobic.
The metaphor and the simile capture relatively different experiences and emotions, yet it's worth noting that they both compare something the Swede is unable to handle with being underwater. By making his anguish physical, Roth offers a more vivid picture of the Swede's helplessness in the years after Merry's disappearance. At the end of the novel, he again employs a sinking metaphor to evoke the Swede's desperation during the dinner party—when he finds himself "all evening long being unmade by steadily sinking under the weight."
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