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Irony
Definition of Metaphor
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor can be stated explicitly, as... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other... read full definition
Book I, Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Fleshy Earth:
Cry, the Beloved Country takes a disquieting pivot following its introduction to the “lovely road” of Ixopo and the Umzimkulu Valley. Through a mix of simile and metaphor, Chapter 1 renders the ecological devastation of South Africa’s countryside in violent, grisly terms:
The great red hills stand desolate, and the earth has torn them away like flesh. The lightning flashes over them, the clouds pour down upon them, the dead streams come to life, full of the red blood of the earth.
Paton’s comparisons draw close links between the ruined earth and a dead body. The red hills have been torn off from the earth “like flesh,” and a metaphor meanwhile transforms the streams of a rainstorm into “red blood.” The effect that the novel imprints is horrific and ghastly by design. What had been a “grass-covered and rolling” pastoral scene has since become an image of a nightmarish, corpse-like body. Gashed and bleeding, the earth has fallen victim to human greed.
By upsetting the serene, blissful account set forth in the novel’s first sentences, Paton structures violence and death into the landscape itself. The novel features instances of extraction aplenty—mines tunnel deep into the ground, while overgrazing has drained Ndotsheni’s soil of its resources. This instance—in which the earth is a ruined, murdered body—gives environmental destruction an element of immediacy and shock that it would normally lack. It provides a frightening criticism of human greed and exploitation that resonates far across the work.
Related Themes:
