A Little Life: Metaphors 4 key examples

Likening Jude to a “blank, faceless prairie” precisely captures the project of anonymity and self-concealment that he undertakes. It translates into visual form the anonymized persona he seeks to cultivate among his friends, the devastating double life he leads. As with the flattened prairie landscape, Jude may well be blankness taken human form. He doesn’t follow sitcoms or eat pizza or watch movies, instead taking cover under excuses of “boring” normalcy and sticking to a sort of script when he presents himself to other people.

Throughout his college years and long after them, the reader follows Jude as he painstakingly stages his show of humdrum ordinariness. But beneath this thin veneer, trauma wriggles and teems. Memories—like the “earthworms and beetles”—burrow their way throughout the novel to expose a character unfairly broken, beaten, and tortured by the past. This brief simile articulates the difference between appearance and reality. It is a reminder that the true Jude—who cuts his forearms each week, burns his triceps, and slams himself against the wall—is not who he makes himself out to be.

The novel underscores Jude’s struggle for forgiveness by likening words to “stones,” a comparison that vaguely recalls biblical parables. To “cast the stone” at someone is to deliver criticism or judgment too rashly. Extended by Jesus as a challenge to the Pharisees who sought to punish an adulterous woman, it is a caution against condemning others before examining the faults within oneself.

But all of this takes a somewhat ironic twist in the context of Jude’s circumstances—his reluctance to forgive inverts the usual connotations of “stones.” In this instance, stones are not words of reproach but of forgiveness. Where the Pharisees punished by throwing the stones, Jude does so by refusing to lift them off his tongue. The stones in this excerpt underscore his tight-lipped reservations rather than any kind of moral generosity. Weighed down by his own pile of stones, Jude burdens himself with his past. The novel’s suffering main character cannot let go of festering resentment any more than personal trauma.

Roaring with rage and brandishing a wine bottle, what had been Jude’s lover has become “wolf” and “coyote.” The metaphor’s predatory valence calls attention to Caleb’s terrifying cruelty, as though suggesting that the entire course of their affair has been less a matter of love than primal consumption. Caleb—who forbids Jude from using his wheelchair and mocks his scarred body—puts his viciousness on full display as he beats his lover for accidentally falling. He is terrifying, oppressive, and feral.

This metaphor also strikes a resonance with the imagined hyenas that hound Jude throughout the remainder of the novel. The hurt inflicted by his lover runs far deeper than skin or bone. Beyond bruising and bloodying his lover, Caleb unleashes a pack of fresh self-doubts and embarrassments that will follow Jude throughout the chapters to come.

Metaphor and imagery work in tandem to communicate the grim totality of Caleb’s abuse. Harold associates Jude’s face to an “animal skinned,” a comparison that is revolting enough on its own. But he extends it even further, elaborating the metaphor with all manner of gruesome details. The skinned animal’s organs “[melt] together into a pudding of flesh,” and Jude’s blackened cheeks have the “blue of decay, of mold.” In the face of such a sight, Harold’s description of his “limbs [turning] to stone” is hardly an overstatement. The novel not only tells but shows, paying service to the scale of Jude’s injuries by imprinting a horrible image in the reader’s mind.