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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
The Things They Carried
Explanation and Analysis—Freedom Birds:
Toward the end of "The Things They Carried," O'Brien introduces the reader to one of the soldiers' shared fantasies: freedom birds. In a long paragraph, which teems with metaphor, simile, imagery, and alliteration, the narrator describes bird-like jets that carry the men away from Vietnam, "beyond duty, beyond gravity and mortification and global entanglements." While this fantasy clearly appeals to the soldiers for a number of reasons, it revolves around a core dream: that of being carried rather than carrying.
In the passage, the plane is metaphorically described as a bird:
At night, on guard, staring into the dark, they were carried away by jumbo jets. They felt the rush of takeoff. Gone! they yelled. And then velocity—wings and engines—a smiling stewardess—but it was more than a plane, it was a real bird, a big sleek silver bird with feathers and talons and high screeching. They were flying.
This dream, full of light, movement, and sound, contrasts with its origin point—a soldier standing still in the dark, quiet and alone. The diction and tone seem to take off with the plane. Additionally, the passage also contains several instances of soft alliteration: jumbo jets, smiling stewardess, big sleek silver bird. As the passage continues, the dream becomes increasingly fantastical and the soldiers' relief turns into glee.
They laughed and held on tight, feeling the cold slap of wind and altitude, soaring, thinking It’s over, I’m gone!—they were naked, they were light and free—it was all lightness, bright and fast and buoyant, light as light, a helium buzz in the brain, a giddy bubbling in the lungs as they were taken up over the clouds and the war, beyond duty, beyond gravity and mortification and global entanglements.
The alliteration continues here, with a number of words starting with the letters l, b, and f. With a similar effect to the alliteration, O'Brien uses a simile to liken the soldiers' emotional and physical sensations to light and lightness. By placing war, duty, gravity, mortification and global entanglements in a single category with the clouds, he gives these intangible things a physical existence. For the soldiers, the ultimate freedom is escaping duties, obligations, and conflicts by flying up above them.
In the rest of the passage, the narrator describes the soldiers' "restful, unencumbered sensation" as "riding the light waves." Eventually, they find themselves above the United States:
[...] sailing that big silver freedom bird over the mountains and oceans, over America, over the farms and great sleeping cities and cemeteries and highways and the golden arches of McDonald’s, it was flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond the sun and through the vast, silent vacuum where there were no burdens and where everything weighed exactly nothing
The visual image of the men sailing the freedom bird above mountains, oceans, farms, sleeping cities, cemeteries, highways, and beyond the sun is one of the most fantastical images of The Things They Carried. It offers a notable contrast to the rest of the story, in which the men trudge along, weighed down by the war and all of the tangible items they have to carry. The narrator emphasizes, however, that it is only "at night" that the men are able "to give themselves over to lightness" and experience the sensation of being "purely borne."
Related Themes:
On the Rainy River
Explanation and Analysis—Fear and Escape:
"On the Rainy River" is full of similes and metaphors capturing O'Brien's fear of the war and urge to evade conscription. In the story, he contrasts his former understanding of courage—that he would step up and behave "like the heroes of our youth" when the need arose—with the crippling fear, rage, and numbness that he feels after being conscripted. Over the course of the story, O'Brien's situation, emotions, and surroundings are compared to things that are loaded with negative connotation.
The summer when he receives his draft notice, O'Brien works at a meatpacking plant, "removing blood clots from the necks of dead pigs." He comes to see his body as one of the carcasses, as though his life were "collapsing towards slaughter." Describing his paralysis with a simile, he likens his internal experience to hurtling down a funnel:
All around me the options seemed to be narrowing, as if I were hurtling down a huge black funnel, the whole world squeezing in tight.
This simile captures O'Brien's simultaneous loneliness and claustrophobia. His uncertainty and fear assumes a physical quality, squeezing him tightly. In the following pages, he describes his fear and urge to escape with more metaphors and similes that similarly make his emotions tangible or visible. As he drives along, for example, he feels "the fear spreading inside [him] like weeds." When he begins to consider escaping to Canada, which is just a few hundred miles north of his hometown, his fear of the war begins to intermingle with his fear of exile, shame, and ridicule. This multilayered fear becomes "a sickness" inside of him, a "real disease."
When he finally decides to go, he feels something "break open in [his] chest." As he drives north, he says that his flight was "like running a dead-end maze." Like the funnel simile, this maze simile provides a physical, visual idea of his claustrophobia and hopelessness. He knows that his choice to go north can't "come to a happy conclusion," but he doesn't know what else to do.
O'Brien eventually makes it to the Rainy River, "which separates Minnesota from Canada, and which for [him] separated one life from another." At the Tip Top Lodge, where Elroy Berdahl takes him in, he again understands his emotions and surroundings through negatively loaded similes and metaphors. The main building of the lodge leans to one side "like a cripple." Although O'Brien identifies Elroy as "the hero of [his] life," he writes that his eyes "had the bluish gray color of a razor blade." When Elroy first looks at him, O'Brien feels "a cutting sensation, as if his gaze were somehow slicing [him] open." During his week on the Rainy River, his sense of shame feels "like a weight pushing [him] toward the war." He describes it as an out-of-body experience:
During my time at the Tip Top Lodge I had the feeling that I’d slipped out of my own skin, hovering a few feet away while some poor yo-yo with my name and face tried to make his way toward a future he didn’t understand and didn’t want.
O'Brien's powerlessness over his future dissociates himself from his own body, as though he were a yo-yo. He likens his last day with Elroy to a vigil and likens his helplessness to toppling overboard and "being swept away by the silver waves." He feels like his whole life is spilling "out into the river" and "swirling away from [him]." After his experience in the boat, he drives south and, soon after, goes to Vietnam.
Related Themes:
Speaking of Courage
Explanation and Analysis—Deep, Oozy Soup:
In "Speaking of Courage," Bowker drives around the lake in his hometown, thinking back to the night Kiowa died. He uses metaphor and imagery to liken the swampy field to a boiling soup. Throughout the story, the field in his flashback contrasts with the lake next to him. At times, the two seem to flow into each other, as past intermingles with present in Bowker's thoughts and in the narration.
The narrator delivers Bowker's flashback through his imagined dialogue—what he would have told his high school girlfriend Sally if she weren't married, or his dad if he weren't busy watching baseball on TV. He thinks about how he would begin the story about Kiowa's death by describing how "it never stopped raining" and that there was muck "everywhere." Intimately accessing Bowker's thoughts, the narrator explains that "by midnight the field turned into soup":
“Just this deep, oozy soup,” he would’ve said. “Like sewage or something. Thick and mushy. You couldn’t sleep. You couldn’t even lie down, not for long, because you’d start to sink under the soup. Real clammy. You could feel the crud coming up inside your boots and pants.”
The metaphorical language and imagery in this passage give the reader a multisensory impression of the night in Bowker's flashback. By comparing the field to soup, O'Brien illustrates some of its visual aspects, but also the heat, texture, motion, and smell. The oozing field seems to prepare to swallow up the men. As Bowker continues his hypothetical narration of the story, he fixates even more on the field's soupy qualities: "The way the earth bubbled. And the smell."
When the field is bombarded, the metaphorical soup's temperature seems to increase rapidly, as the field goes from oozing to boiling.
The field was boiling. The shells made deep slushy craters, opening up all those years of waste, centuries worth, and the smell came bubbling out of the earth.
The reader receives Bowker's flashbacks to the field by the river alongside the narrator's descriptions of the lake he keeps circling around. As the story progresses, the two become more and more associated. Like the field, the lake is hot and disgusting—"often filthy and algaed." Another parallel comes from the date: it is July 4th, and the town is preparing for its annual firework display. Just as the soldiers took mortar fire when they bivouacked in the field, the lake will witness explosions of its own later that evening.
In the story, Bowker thinks about how he could lecture the people in his town on feces: "The smell, in particular, but also the numerous varieties of texture and taste." On the gruesome evening in his flashback, the muck of the field filled his nose and mouth. Just before the story ends, he links the field of the flashback with the lake of his current surroundings one final time, by going out into the lake and tasting the water:
After a time he got out, walked down to the beach, and waded into the lake without undressing. The water felt warm against his skin. He put his head under. He opened his lips, very slightly, for the taste, then he stood up and folded his arms and watched the fireworks.
In this touching conclusion, Bowker puts an end to his never-ending circles around the lake, and actually gets into it. The narrator leaves it implicit that, as he opens his mouth, he thinks back to the horrible stink and taste of the field on the night Kiowa died. In addition, the fireworks above him evoke the mortar fire that made the field boil like soup.
Related Themes:
The Ghost Soldiers
Explanation and Analysis—Leaking:
When O'Brien has a flashback to being shot in "The Ghost Soldiers," he uses figurative language to describe the physical sensations in his body. By way of similes and metaphors, he compares his gunshot wound to spilling, leaking, and becoming hollow.
He later experiences these same sensations during his scheme against Bobby Jorgenson, as he feels increasingly fragile and empty. Ultimately, O'Brien's scheme backfires, because he retraumatizes himself as he watches fear seize Jorgenson's body. He had originally set out to teach Jorgenson a lesson but winds up teaching himself one in the process.
As he watches Jorgenson, O'Brien experiences a flashback to the second time he was shot:
It was the same feeling I’d had out along the Song Tra Bong. Like I was losing myself, everything spilling out. I remembered how the bullet had made a soft puffing noise inside me. I remembered lying there for a long while, listening to the river, the gunfire and voices, how I kept calling out for a medic but how nobody came and how I finally reached back and touched the hole. The blood was warm like dishwater. I could feel my pants filling up with it. All this blood, I thought—I’ll be hollow.
In this passage, he uses a simile to compare his current and past feelings to "everything spilling out." He also uses a simile to compare his blood to "warm [...] dishwater." As it fills his pants, he feels as though he will become hollow. In the rest of the flashback, O'Brien continues to metaphorically liken his sensations to leaking:
I was still leaking. [...] I turned and clamped a hand against the wound and tried to plug it up. Leaking to death, I thought. Like a genie swirling out of a bottle—like a cloud of gas—I was drifting upward out of my own body.
Here, O'Brien uses a simile to compare the separation he feels from his body as he goes into shock to "a genie swirling out of a bottle" and "a cloud of gas." The leaking metaphor not only points to the physical sensation of his blood leaving his body, but it also captures the more spiritual or emotional sensation of his soul exiting his corporeal self. The shock both accentuates and shuts down his physical sense of being in a body.
In the end, O'Brien seems to be more negatively impacted by his plot to scare Jorgenson than Jorgenson himself is. While his plan revolved around getting even, the more important outcome seems to be O'Brien's processing of the extreme sensations and emotions he felt after he was shot. He can certainly blame, and even punish, Jorgenson for neglecting to treat him for shock, but the more pressing need is to reflect on what happened when he came face to face with his own mortality.
Related Themes:
