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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
Metaphors
Explanation and Analysis—Strife as Bird:
Twyla uses a metaphor when describing the "strife" of the desegregation process. The metaphor demonstrates the feeling of unfamiliarity she experiences when discussing present racial tension:
Strife came to us that fall. At least that’s what the paper called it. Strife. Racial strife. The word made me think of a bird—a big shrieking bird out of 1,000,000,000 BC. Flapping its wings and cawing. Its eye with no lid always bearing down on you. All day it screeched and at night it slept on the rooftops.
Thinking of "strife" as a bird creates a sense of foreignness around “strife” as a word and a descriptor for racial tensions. This bird is strange and aggressive, and furthermore, it is wholly unknown to all of Newburgh's current inhabitants, hailing from a time more than a billion years before the Civil Rights Era.
Framing the discussion of "racial strife" like this casts doubt on the ability of communicative language to adequately capture reality. Even though "racial strife" was commonly understood shorthand to describe the racial tension of the Civil Rights Era, it seems strangely alien to those actually living through it. This is evidently quite a painful misalignment of language and reality in Twyla's eyes, the bird "shrieking," "screech[ing]," and its eye "always bearing down on you." The failure of language to make the moment's tension legible begets a sense of fear and despair for the narrator.
Related Themes:
