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Setting
Definition of Simile
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like" or "as," but can also... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often... read full definition
Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Hated Home:
Richard is pleased, in Chapter 2, to find out that he and his family will move in with his mother's cousin in Elaine, Arkansas, and that they will visit Granny in Jackson on the way. He describes this pleasure using both a metaphor and a simile:
As the words fell from my mother's lips, a long and heavy anxiety lifted from me. Excited, I rushed about and gathered my ragged clothes. I was leaving the hated home, hunger, fear, leaving days that had been as dark and lonely as death.
First, there is a metaphor: "a long and heavy anxiety lifted from me." Richard imagines his anxiety as something physically large and onerous. But then there is a simile that reconsiders the anxiety: "leaving days that had been dark and lonely as death." The simile and metaphor describe two different things, Richard's anxiety and then his home life. Both are certainly unpleasant and depressing, but one is heavy and physical and one is ethereal and abstract. In other words, the figurative language in this passage helps to clarify the specific nature of Richard's emotions. Also, the variety of figuration helps to show just how much Richard feels out of place in his family, in that the dislocation manifests in both abstract and material ways.
Related Themes:
Chapter 9
Explanation and Analysis—Like a Blind Man:
In Chapter 9, Richard gets a job working for an optometrist named Crane but is bullied out of it by Crane's cruel employees Pease and Reynolds. When Richard decides to leave the job, Crane gives him a severance payment, but their farewell is awkward, which Richard expresses through simile:
He handed me my money, more than I had earned for the week. I thanked him and rose to leave. He rose. I went into the hallway and he followed me. He reached out his hand.
"It's tough for you down here," he said.
I barely touched his hand. I walked swiftly down the hall, fighting against crying again. I ran down the steps, then paused and looked back up. He was standing at the head of the stairs, shaking his head. I went into the sunshine and walked home like a blind man.
Richard is distraught to lose this job, as he thought it would give him some kind of financial security at last: "'I had hoped for a lot from this job,' I said. 'I'd wanted to go to school, to college... .'" But, once again, due to a White man willfully framing him for an impoliteness he did not commit, he loses this job like so many others. Richard takes the money and leaves, and he "went into the sunshine and walked home like a blind man." This simile depicts the numb feeling that Richard feels in this moment of extreme disappointment. He uses light often in the memoir to describe emotion and particularly uses blinding light to describe overwhelming emotion. Here the physical release of being let back out into the world contrasts with the emotional constraint of Richard's overwhelming disappointment.
Related Themes:
