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Simile
Explanation and Analysis—Drifting into Marriage:
When Rahel is older, she attends an architecture college in Delhi and meets Larry McCaslin. The story uses a simile to describe how Rahel, numb and dejected, settles for marriage with Larry:
Rahel drifted into marriage like a passenger drifts towards an unoccupied chair in an airport lounge. With a Sitting Down sense. She returned with him to Boston.
[…] He held her as though she was a gift. Given to him in love. Something still and small. Unbearably precious.
But when they made love he was offended by her eyes. They behaved as though they belonged to someone else. Someone watching. Looking out of the window at the sea. At a boat in the river. Or a passerby in the mist in a hat.
In this passage, the novel compares Rahel’s decision to marry Larry McCaslin to a passenger at an airport trying finding a seat. These passengers wander aimlessly, looking for the first available and acceptable seat. Larry McCaslin was likely the first respectable, available man that Rahel came across in her adulthood.
Much like how Estha surrenders to the quietness tangling inside of him, Rahel simply lets life happen to her without taking action or making decisions for her own good. After the traumatic events in Ayemenem, Rahel no longer possesses the strength to refuse people and opportunities—good or bad—that life throws at her. For this reason, she is absent even when she and Larry are together. While her body is with Larry, her mind is elsewhere, trapped in Ayemenem and in the unresolved past.
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