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Metaphor
Explanation and Analysis—Elephants and Snakes:
The story features an instance of simile, metaphor, and personification in describing the house’s combat with the fire. As the fire sweeps across the kitchen, the ranks of vacuum mice scuttle out to contain the flames and the attic trapdoors deploy a “gushing green chemical”:
The fire backed off, as even an elephant must at the sight of a dead snake. Now there were twenty snakes whipping over the floor, killing the fire with a clear cold venom of green froth.
In the first of these sentences, a simile links the fire’s movements to that of a frightened “elephant” recoiling before a snake. This is followed immediately by a metaphor that develops the comparison, identifying the “repellant” as the “snake.” Importantly, this transition from simile to metaphor intensifies the degree of comparison. The green chemicals don’t merely resemble “snakes”—at this point, they have become them. What had been understood to be the “dead snake” just one sentence before is now “whipping over the floor” and spewing “cold venom.” The repellant becomes more lifelike through the metaphor’s tightened association.
In doing so, this elaborate act of comparison invests the fire and repellant with an unlikely dynamism. Both the fire and its adversary are moving, attacking, and defending themselves. Their animalistic intensity creates a sense of vitality that is absent anywhere else. In a town of ruined houses buried beneath charcoal ash, they seem to be more lifelike and vivid than all of humanity’s own doomed creations.
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