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Simile
Explanation and Analysis—The Lawyer’s Lament:
In his final letter to the banker, the lawyer moves from listing all of the ways that literature helped him survive his imprisonment to condemning it, using three similes in the process:
“And I despise your books, despise all wordly blessings and wisdom. Everything is void, frail, visionary and delusive like a mirage. Though you be proud and wise and beautiful, yet will death wipe you from the face of the earth like the mice underground; and your posterity, your history, and the immortality of your men of genius will be as frozen slag, burnt down together with the terrestrial globe.”
The first simile here—in which the lawyer describes how books helped him realize that “[e]verything is void, frail, visionary and delusive like a mirage”—is evocative. The lawyer is ending his imprisonment deeply cynical about life, viewing it as being “like a mirage” rather than seeing life itself as a meaningful reality. As he goes on to describe later in the letter, it’s only heaven that offers an escape from this “void” and “delusive” reality.
The second simile the lawyer uses—“death [will] wipe you from the face of the earth like the mice underground”—furthers his dark and cynical view of humankind, comparing people to mice who are fated to live below ground.
In the third simile—"your posterity, your history, and the immortality of your men of genius will be as frozen slag”—the lawyer condemns humanity to existing as “frozen slag,” a type of waste that separates from metals during the smelting process. This is his way of saying that humankind’s “posterity,” “history,” and “men of genius” are not actually all that impressive.
All of this negative, nihilistic language combines to make it clear to the banker (and readers) that, after fifteen years of solitude, the lawyer has lost all sense of the meaning of life. In his view, there is no meaning. This is why he leaves his confinement five minutes before he would have won the bet and runs away into the night, leaving society behind.
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