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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 1: The Perforated Sheet
Explanation and Analysis—Handcuffed:
At the beginning of the novel, Saleem Sinai uses metaphor to connect India's independence to his own birth:
At the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. [. . .] Thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country.
Saleem uses words like "handcuffed" and "indissolubly chained" to describe the mysterious nature of his birth, gifts, and connection to his home country of India. He has been "chained" to his country's history due to the timing and circumstances of his birth, as he is born on the exact day that India gains independence from the British Empire. His metaphorical chaining is a way of understanding the intergenerational effects of colonialism on the colonized. In the same way that Saleem must relive Britain's colonization of India through his fantastical relationship to time, so must formerly colonized peoples deal with the legacy of occupation in their country. This legacy can include many things, ranging from war to environmental destruction to diaspora to the loss of native languages. Colonized peoples often remain psychologically and emotionally "chained" to this destructive history long after their occupiers have left.
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Book 1: Hit-the-Spittoon
Explanation and Analysis—Domestic Self-Defense:
In Book 1, Section 3—Hit-the-Spittoon, Saleem describes Naseem's active resistance to Aadam Aziz, including his values, decisions, and choice to practice Islam less conservatively. Saleem uses an implied metaphor to compare this opposition to modernism to a war. Naseem has been "driven to the barricades" by her husband:
It was perhaps the obligation of facial nudity, coupled with Aziz’s constant requests for her to move beneath him, that had driven her to the barricades; and the domestic rules she established were a system of self-defense so impregnable that Aziz, after many fruitless attempts, had more or less given up trying to storm her many ravelins and bastions, leaving her, like a large smug spider, to rule her chosen domain.
While Saleem does not directly compare his mother's resistance to a war, he implies the metaphor using proximate language: Naseem's "system of self-defense" is "impregnable," and she attempts to "storm her many ravelins and bastions." This bit of figurative language aptly juxtaposes Naseem and Aadam's conflict with the broader conflict taking place on the Indian subcontinent. Naseem's conservative religious and social values conflict with Aadam's more liberal values. Aadam's Westernization is also a point of conflict. These issues divide Aadam from Naseem and fuel their interpersonal "war," paralleling the real and bloody conflict between religious factions in 20th-century India.
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Explanation and Analysis—Preserving:
In the following excerpt, Saleem breaks away from the central narrative to ramble about the relationship between pickling and storytelling. Through metaphor, Saleem compares the two actions:
And my chutneys and kasaundies are, after all, connected to my nocturnal scribblings—by day amongst the pickle-vats, by night within these sheets, I spend my time at the great work of preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks.
Discussing his "chutneys and kasaundies," Saleem likens the preserving of memory through story to the preserving of food. This passage dwells on the complex relationship between narrative and time. The longer a person waits to preserve memory in the form of writing, the greater the "corruption of the clocks." Time degrades the quality of memory, just as bacteria naturally causes food to decompose.
Curiously, in this passage, time is not entirely personified as it is in other sections of the novel. In this figurative description, time operates akin to any other force of nature: it can only be kept at bay for so long. Like water, time will always find a way through the cracks. This is similar to how every bit of food, no matter how well-preserved, will eventually mold if the spores are not somehow kept at bay. Clocks, similarly, must be wound regularly to avoid the corruption of their time-telling abilities. Time adheres to the laws of entropy, and when it comes to storytelling, the truth (whatever that may be) will quickly degrade if it is not preserved quickly.
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Explanation and Analysis—Naseem the Basilisk:
Saleem uses metaphor to describe an encounter between the Rani and Naseem that took place during Naseem's feud with her husband, Aadam. In defiance of her husband's values and the decisions he makes on behalf of the household, Naseem refuses to feed Aadam, and he refuses to eat. In desperation, the Rani sends emissaries speak with Naseem, hoping to convince her to stop starving Aadam. Saleem metaphorically compares Naseem's behavior during this encounter to that of a basilisk:
'India isn’t full of enough starving people?’ the emissaries asked Naseem, and she unleashed a basilisk glare which was already becoming legend. [. . .] She pierced her visitors with lidless eyes and stared them down. Their voices turned to stone; their hearts froze; and alone in a room with strange men, my grandmother sat in triumph, surrounded by downcast eyes.
A basilisk is a mythical creature known for its ability to turn people to stone via eye contact. Naseem behaves like abasilisk because she resents being forced to violate her own ideas about modesty, propriety, and gender roles for her more modern husband. Curiously, her ability to intimidate the Rani's emissaries in the above passage is anything but traditionally feminine behavior. Without realizing it, Naseem actually breaks gender stereotypes willingly when it suits her purposes.
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Book 1: Under the Carpet
Explanation and Analysis—Family History:
In Book 1, Section 4—Under the Carpet, Saleem outlines his rationale for discussing his family's complex problems and secrets without excluding information. He frames this endeavor as a push toward truth in storytelling, revealing details that some might consider illicit or "unspeakable." He explores this act of revelation and truth-telling through metaphor:
Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately, this makes the stories less juicy; so I am about to become the first and only member of my family to flout the laws of halal. Letting no blood escape from the body of the tale, I arrive at the unspeakable part; and, undaunted, press on.
Saleem uses metaphor to compare the "laws" of family storytelling and memory to the laws of halal. Halal is a Qur'anic system of classification for determining what is and isn't appropriate behavior under Islamic tradition and can include inappropriate behaviors in addition to dietary restrictions. Saleem is "flouting the laws of halal" by speaking about the unsavory parts of his family's history, contrary to what would perhaps be their wishes.
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Book 1: A Public Announcement
Explanation and Analysis—Public Announcement:
Saleem uses metaphor to describe his presence as the narrator in the story, flying high above the events taking place and foreshadowing those to come:
It’s almost time for the public announcement. I won’t deny I’m excited: I’ve been hanging around in the background of my own story for too long, and although it’s still a little while before I can take over, it’s nice to get a look in. So, with a sense of high expectation, I follow the pointing finger in the sky and look down upon my parents’ neighborhood [. . .] all of it foreshortened by my high-in-the-sky point of view.
Saleem positions himself above the story being told, both on a figurative level in this passage ("all of it foreshortened by my high-in-the-sky point of view"), as well as on a broader level as the narrator of the book. He uses flight as a metaphor to demonstrate the former and the device of foreshadowing to demonstrate the latter. By alluding to the future announcement of his birth, Saleem demonstrates that he is above and outside of his own story, able to showcase his foreknowledge of events at will.
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Explanation and Analysis—Public Monster:
Saleem uses metaphor to describe Mr. Kemal's shady sense of business ethics:
In the godown, roll upon roll of leathercloth; and the commodities dealt in by Mr. Kemal, rice tea lentils—he hoards them all over the country in vast quantities, as a form of protection against the many-headed many-mouthed rapacious monster that is the public, which, if given its heads, would force prices so low in a time of abundance that godfearing entrepreneurs would starve while the monster grew fat . . .
In this excerpt, Saleem reveals that Mr. Kemal thinks of his customers abstractly as the "many-headed many-mouthed rapacious monster that is the public," dehumanizing lower-class Indian people by treating them as a monstrous conglomerate. "Forcing prices low in a time of abundance" would seem to be both the logical and moral thing to do, in order to keep people from going hungry. As a businessman used to exploiting the lower classes for profit, however, Mr. Kemal operates by the same logic of the British colonial system. Use of metaphor in this passage highlights the manner in which "godfearing entrepreneurs" focus on their own profits over the general well-being of consumers.
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Explanation and Analysis—Father and Son:
Saleem uses metaphor to describe the intergenerational effects of his father's actions, cowardices, and limitations:
His inability to follow his own nose dripped into me, to some extent clouding the nasal inheritance I received from other places, and making me, for year after year, incapable of sniffing out the true road . . .
In this passage, the image of "nasal inheritance" is a strong one, with inabilities "drip[ping]" from father to son like mucus. The nasal dripping carries multiple figurative meanings: namely, it represents Ahmed's blind spots, inabilities, and mistakes which will eventually trickle down to his son, affecting two lives instead of one. The dripping also represents intergenerational trauma, in that the trials and tribulations Ahmed went through in India continue to have a psychological effect on his own son to this very day.
The use of the word "dripping" is also significant because it conjures up the image of gradually flowing water with the capability to erode things over time. The inheritance Saleem receives from Ahmed will, indeed, wear him down over time, linking him inexorably not only to the particular traumas of his family but to the nationwide traumas of India as a colonized nation. Traumatic inheritance may be gradual as it "drips" into a person, but its effect over time can be erosive to the psyche.
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Explanation and Analysis—The Perforated Sheet:
Saleem uses metaphor to describe the process by which Amina Sinai convinced herself to fall in love with his father, Ahmed Sinai:
Bringing her gift of assiduity to bear, [Amina] began to train herself to love [Ahmed]. To do this she divided him, mentally, into every single one of his component parts, physical as well as behavioral, compartmentalizing him into lips and verbal tics and likes . . . in short, she fell under the spell of the perforated sheet of her own parents, because she resolved to fall in love with her husband bit by bit.
In this section, the "perforated sheet" metaphorically connects the events of Aadam Aziz's courtship to his daughter's own romantic negotiations. Both Aadam and his daughter figuratively partition their spouses into parts and are seemingly only capable of loving them via this process. Where Aadam partitioned his spouse into parts physically, in order to modestly diagnose her ailments, Amina subdivides her husband psychologically, mapping him onto another man in order to better appreciate him.
This fragmenting process in the central characters' love lives serves an allegorical purpose, connecting the issue of romantic compatibility to that of cultural and religious compatibility—issues that would feature prominently during the British Empire's Partition of India in 1947.
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Book 1: Methwold
Explanation and Analysis—Saleem as a Fetus:
Saleem uses extended metaphor to compare his own gestational period as a fetus to the writing process:
By the time the rains came at the end of June, the fetus was fully formed inside her womb. Knees and nose were present; and as many heads as would grow were already in position. What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book—perhaps an encyclopedia—even a whole language …
It is no coincidence that Saleem chooses to compare his creation in the womb to the creation of language. As the narrator and central figure in Midnight's Children, Saleem's life naturally intertwines itself with the process of crafting written words. He is inexorably linked to language formation through his role as a storyteller—a linkage that extends beyond the mere mechanics of writing. Saleem's personal identity is intimately connected to India's culture, history, and future. His sense of self, in turn, depends on his ability to remember, imagine, and write about India and his familial connection to it. Writing and language form a core aspect of Saleem's identity, so much so that these abilities develop as a part of him in the womb. In a sense, writing constitutes all that Saleem is, given his status as a fictional character created by Rushdie (the author of Midnight's Children).
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