All The King's Men: Similes 7 key examples

Lucy is like a sea captain watching the engine room of a well-run ship. One purpose of this simile is plain aesthetic beauty: Jack's imagination runs wild as he imagines the happily eating men around him as pistons in a ship, which is itself imagined as God's mind, as the ship chugs along on a picturesque imaginary sea. During this scene in a somewhat dilapidated home in rural Louisiana, Jack's simile instantaneously conjures an entirely different environment, to beautiful effect. The extreme difference of the description in the simile from the actual scene at hand also shows how strongly Lucy enjoys this moment.

This simile also helps to describe Lucy's character, which is rarely investigated in much depth in the novel. She enjoys seeing those around her happy and fed. She sees a well-stocked dinner table as the highest goal in life, and yet she clearly is able to achieve this goal fairly regularly. She has an "inner faith in happiness," and seems fulfilled and without any apparent desire for social climbing. Thus the character of Lucy contrasts both with her husband, with his undying ambition, and with Jack, with his tendency toward nihilism and depression.

Willie's father and wife both love him, but they cannot have him. Willie, in this moment Jack imagines, doesn't sit with Lucy and Old Man Stark by the fire because he was "upstairs in his room with his face bent over a law book, his face puzzled and earnest and the tousle of hair hanging."  Willie neglects his relationships, here and throughout the novel, because he is single-mindedly focused on his own moral ideas, legal training, and political ambitions. Jack describes how these feelings were growing at that time with a grotesque simile: "like a great potato in a dark, damp cellar." This image is rather gross—a giant potato growing in the dirt of a dank cellar "inside" Willie. This is characteristic of the tone of the book, which aims to describe Willie truly but also dramatically, exaggerating both his good and bad qualities.

Here Jack uses a simile to describe the particular way that Sugar-Boy eats sugar, describing him "like an undernourished leprechaun." This is, for one, meant to be funny. Sugar-Boy, with his exaggerated Irish features and stuttering devotion to Willie, often serves as comic relief. (This makes his involvement in the climactic gunfight in Chapter 9 yet more striking.) The description is visually specific, with Sugar-Boy's "black little teeth" and "thin little mystic Irish cheeks" helping to introduce the character in detail to the reader. This simile also helps to establish Jack's particular tone, caustic and ironic yet precisely observant toward almost everyone he meets.

Just before this simile, Jack speaks directly to the reader: "No doubt you thought Sugar-Boy was a Negro, from his name. But he wasn't. He was Irish, from the wrong side of the tracks." And indeed, as shown in the description above, Sugar-Boy is very Irish. Jack goes to some length, in the above simile, to make Sugar-Boy into an Irish caricature, "an undernourished leprechaun." This aside to the reader is exemplary of Jack's political views as well. To Jack, freedom is ideally determined by one's knowledge and one's position in society, not by their race.

This is, for one thing, merely a humorous and evocative simile. Jack enjoys images that are unusual and slapstick in their physical manifestation, and a poor flea trying to bite a stone lion is a funny idea. Willie, the tall, stocky, big-shot politician, is imagined as a pitiful insect.

The simile also speaks to Willie's character. Another way to imagine this image is that Willie's boundless political ambition and work ethic is such that he could find success even in the most dire of circumstances, like a flea on a marble lion—getting blood from a stone. The carved marble lion is on a monument, making the lion a representative of state power and prestige. Willie's perseverance and single-mindedness, despite opposition and implausibility, is demonstrated in the flea, earnestly out for blood even from marble lions.

Willie certainly does not seem like someone who has given up on his campaign just because his crowds are less interested in him. He looked "like a man in a kind of waking dream," "a man who has just pulled out of a hard sickness." Willie actually looks, assumedly, approximately the same as he always has, but Jack describes his vitality and political vigor through these similes.

But Jack presents these similes ironically. Willie appears to have "pulled out of a hard sickness," based on his continued energy in his speeches. But in reality, Jack says, Willie has another illness, which Jack uses as a metaphor: "galloping political anemia." Jack implies that Willie's lack of support from the party is like having a lack of iron in the blood, causing fatigue and loss of strength. There is a more subtle irony and foreshadowing from Jack here, too, as this episode will cause Willie to descend into another "sickness": alcoholism, which will follow him for the rest of his life. 

Jack describes that falling in love was like learning "unexpectedly that he has inherited a million dollars," and like being "a basket of eggs." Both of these similes describe how falling in love happened unexpectedly, as if it happened to him, even though it is a feeling in his own mind. Jack separates this feeling from himself and is shocked that he has seemingly become a different person after falling in love. He feels fragile and valuable, as if he is carrying something of great worth. He describes his love as either a million dollars or a basket of eggs: both are things that one ought to be very careful with.

This is also a moment of unusual emotional vulnerability from Jack. He usually avoids strong emotions, retreating to his "Great Sleeps" when life becomes difficult. This prevents himself, as well as the reader, from learning much about Jack's deeper emotional state. Here, though, when a powerful feeling of love settles on him, apparently against his will, he treats himself with extreme care, as if this new feeling is not something to be avoided, but something to be protected and cherished. When Jack reveals this depth of affection for Anne, it justifies his extreme reaction to her affair with Willie. In other words, this passage shows how seriously Jack took his love for Anne and how much his heart was broken when she betrayed him.

Jack describes how "you could see" Anne's painful attempt to remember this traumatic episode from her life. He uses a terrible simile, that the memory is "like somebody lifting the sheet off the face of a corpse." This turns Anne's memory into a very physical and morbid action. It is a powerful description of Anne's grief that to even attempt to remember an event just before Adam's death is tantamount to looking upon his real dead body. But Anne is still willing to peer at Adam's face in her memory and attempt to help Jack's investigation. This is a testament to Anne's strong devotion to truth and justice, a constant throughout the novel. Note, of course, that Anne is mistaken here, or her information from Adam was incorrect: it was Sadie Burke who actually made the call to Adam.