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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
Book 1
Explanation and Analysis—Movie Blackout:
Early in the first book, Bigger miserably walks down the street, questioning whether to take the job at the Dalton house. As he walks, he sees a poster of Buckley, who is running for State's Attorney again. The poster is beguiling and includes a telling simile:
The poster showed one of those faces that looked straight at you and when you looked at it and all the while you were walking and turning your head to look at it it kept looking unblinkingly back at you until you got so far from it you had to take your eyes away, and then it stopped, like a movie blackout. Above the top of the poster were tall red letters: YOU CAN'T WIN!
The description of the poster is entirely strange. It seems to follow Bigger's eyes, as if the gaze of the law is continually keeping Bigger in its sights. Then, stranger still, once he can get far enough away from it, "it stopped, like a movie blackout." The image of the poster seems supernatural as it follows Bigger around. But the simile, describing how Bigger manages to look away, is very simple and relatable. Bigger, of course, knows what a movie blackout looks like, since he goes to the movies often, including just after this passage. The simile helps represent the snap back to reality after Bigger tears his eyes from the poster.
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Explanation and Analysis—A Knothole in the Fence:
As Bigger talks to Gus early in Book 1, he uses a series of simple observations and similes that, taken together, are a concise and compelling description of what it was like to be Black in America in the 1930s:
Every time I think about it I feel like somebody's poking a red-hot iron down my throat. Goddamnit, look! We live here and they live here. We black and they white. They got things and we ain't. They do things and we can't. It's just like living in jail. Half the time I feel like I'm on the outside of the world peeping through a knothole in the fence....
Bigger describes the world in the simplest terms possible: "We live here and they live here. We black and they white." This is a very straightforward description. All Chicagoans, despite the fact that they all live in the same place, are not the same; some have rights and some do not. That is the unavoidable truth that Bigger describes in the most basic way.
But in these similes, Bigger makes an important claim: this fundamental situation is "just like living in jail." It feels "like somebody's poking a red-hot iron down my throat." Again, what Bigger is comparing to "jail" is his simplest version of life around him. Life itself, to Bigger, is like jail. Furthermore, being alive is like being in constant pain. This is the most damning way to describe American racism and segregation.
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Book 2
Explanation and Analysis—Deep and Wayward:
Bigger feels that his entire life changed after he killed Mary Dalton. As he walks to the Dalton's house on Sunday morning to check on the state of Mary's body in the furnace, he thinks to himself about his new outlook. The narrative uses two similes in this moment:
Like a man reborn, he wanted to test and taste each thing now to see how it went; like a man risen up well from a long illness, he felt deep and wayward whims.
As Wright shows in the paired similes above, Bigger feels "like a man reborn" and "a man risen up well from a long illness." He feels that the murder has made him purer, smarter, and more adventurous. After the murder, Bigger feels like he can finally see, and he describes everyone around him as blind. Just before this passage, Bigger, at home with his family, remarks upon how each of them "only see to the surface of things." Bigger, though, now understands that his life is controlled by racism; he must follow the rules whenever white people are watching, but he feels total freedom to do what he likes otherwise. This, he feels, comes from his new ability to see the mechanisms of racism that control his life, which others cannot.
This feeling of new sight is inherent in both of these similes. Bigger frames his life before the murder as a kind of sleep, a waking death (he is now "reborn"); or else as a period of illness and isolation in which he could not see the world. His response, with this new sensation, is to attempt to perceive as much as possible of the world around him. Bigger's "deep and wayward whims" are to see more of the world, in a way others cannot. It is this new sight and this new perception of the racist structure that controls his life that leads Bigger to his crimes throughout the rest of Book Two, particularly the rape and murder of Bessie. As he describes, he feels like he sees the structure around him and that leads him to acts of unthinkable violence.
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