Uncle Vanya: Metaphors 5 key examples

When Mariya Vasilyevna uses the word "enlightenment" to describe her son, she means it in the intellectual sense. Voynitsky used to care about learning, but disillusionment with Serebryakov and his work has led him to abandon the pursuit of knowledge. Seizing on the multiple meanings of enlightenment, Voynitsky addresses the irony of seeking enlightenment without giving brightness to other people. Throughout the play, he charges Serebryakov with doing just that. Voynitsky despairs that he has wasted a substantial portion of his life devoted to the Professor's empty, egotistical intellectualism.

He then goes on to elaborate on intellectualism as the opposite of illumination through a metaphor. Saying that he used to "cloud" his eyes with "learned talk," which he claims his mother and other disciples of Serebryakov still do, he compares intellectual study to obscurity. Acting as a fog, this intellectual study has the ironic effect of clouding one's vision. As a result, learning results in the opposite of awareness and knowledge—a professor's supposed goals.

Through this metaphor, Voynitsky reflects on the irony of studying so hard you forget to open your eyes and participate in the world around you. He feels a great deal of bitterness over this irony because he has wasted precious years unquestioningly swept up in the Professor's work. Citing his age, Vanya expresses that he feels old and regrets that he "lost the time when [he] could have had everything that [his] age now denies [him]."

In this portion of dialogue, Astrov compares his hopelessness to lacking a "tiny light in the distance." When a person sees a tiny light in the distance, the exhaustion, darkness, and spiky brambles don't matter. The tiny light takes over, filling the person with purpose and hope. Astrov is more or less saying that he sees no light at the end of the tunnel, but his metaphorical tunnel is a forest. This imagined forest setting is significant, as Astrov feels passionate about forest conservation. It's a familiar place that he cherishes and that fills him with purpose, and yet even that keeps him from feeling hope. 

Astrov relates the inability to see a tiny light to a lack of human affection. He goes on to explain to Sonya that he expects nothing: "I don’t love humanity […]. It’s a long time since I loved anyone." Through this statement, he relates the possibility of hope to loving other people. He indicates that he once felt love for other people and suggests that he therefore also saw the tiny light when he was younger. When considering Astrov's speech in context with the dejected characters Serebryakov and Voynitsky, it can seem that Chekhov is insinuating that old age brings about an inability to love and hope. 

The supposed tomb in question is Serebryakov's rural estate, which he has recently relocated to with his second wife, Yelena. Contrasting his esteemed colleagues with the "fools" who live "here," the Professor also distinguishes the invigorating atmosphere of the university with the drab atmosphere of his rural home. He associates "learning" with the city, and therefore connects the possibility of prestige with the urban environment.

Voynitsky explains in the first act that the estate came into Serebryakov's hands through his first wife, and that "he has to live there because he can’t afford to live in the city." Serebryakov brushes off these financial constraints as "no good reason," and disparages his friends and family members as "worthless." The estate saves Serebryakov from destitution, but he nevertheless considers it his tomb. Leaving the city is tantamount to dying because it keeps him from being seen by people he respects and prevents him from building his legacy. 

Within the same line, Serebryakov uses a second comparison to capture how it feels to live in the countryside, this time through a simile:

I want to live, I like success, I like fame, making a noise, and here it’s like being in exile. 

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He starts the sentence with words that have a positive connotation and suggest vitality: "live," "success," "fame," and "making a noise." These are things he likes and wants. Such an aspirational beginning gives the sentence's ending an especially negative connotation. For Serebryakov, being at the estate is like being dead or like being exiled from the excitement and life of the city. It stands in the way of living, success, fame, and making a noise.

Later in the same scene, Yelena personifies the house. Calling it "troubled," she goes on to list out the ways in which the people inhabiting the estate fill it with a bad atmosphere. All of these descriptions, along with other comments made by the characters in other parts of the play, establish the estate as desolate, stifling, and claustrophobic. Blaming the physical setting for the atmosphere the characters create, they neglect to recognize the part they play in their own misery.

To substantiate her claim that Yelena's boredom is infectious, Sonya brings up three examples of the way in which her appearance at the estate has interrupted the way the people in the household operate. First, "Uncle Vanya does nothing and just follows you round like a shadow." Combining the overarching disease metaphor with a simile, Sonya suggests that Yelena's idle presence empties Voynitsky of his vitality. Second, she says that she herself has been infected by Yelena: "I’ve left my work and come running to you to talk. I’ve got lazy, I can’t do it!" Usually busy and hardworking, Sonya finds she has changed since Yelena showed up at the estate. Like a disease would, Yelena has interrupted the work flow and energy that Sonya used to inform her sense of self. Finally, the disease has even spread to Astrov, the doctor, who used to pay infrequent visits but now "drives over here every day," leaving "his woods and his practice."

The metaphor of boredom as a disease is reinforced as a motif towards the end of the final act, when Astrov tells Yelena the same thing that Sonya told her in the previous act. He explains that as soon as she and Serebryakov appeared at the estate, everyone "who was busily working here and creating something had to drop what they were doing." To sum up the effect they had on the other characters, he tells her that the two of them "infected all of us with your idleness." 

The metaphor acquires particular force when it comes from a doctor whose time largely goes to attempting to cure local peasants and workers from sickness. At the very start of the play, in fact, he tells Marina a gripping story about failing to save a patient from typhus. He's well-acquainted with real, non-metaphorical diseases, and likens their destructive effect to that of the couple's affluent inaction. Like a walking epidemic, Yelena and her husband "bring destruction" wherever they "tread."

Through this contrasting set of comparisons, Yelena sympathizes with Sonya's emotions. She understands why Sonya would find Astrov alluring when he is the only person who stands out among the people the young woman sees in her daily life. At the same time, Yelena looks down on the people in Voynitsky's household within this same expression of sympathy. In her view, the people who live there are barely human: they are merely colorless, vulgar masses that wander around. She's unable to see anything meaningful about the way they live their lives. 

Up against these gray blobs, the "handsome, interesting, attractive" man who sometimes comes around is a bright source of light—like a moon. Whereas the blobs are only capable of wandering around aimlessly, the metaphorical moon rises in the sky. This difference in motion is notable. Whereas wandering doesn't usually have a destination or purpose, a rising moon is constantly achieving something through its movement. Herself charged with being idle by other characters, Yelena suggests that no one on the estate does any meaningful work besides the doctor, who's only there occasionally.

The contrasts that Yelena uses in her soliloquy reinforce the differences between Astrov and Voynitsky. Earlier in the act, Sonya calls Voynitsky a shadow. Here, Yelena calls Astrov a bright moon. Both disillusioned and fixated on their aging, the men are foils for one another. The big difference between them is the extent to which they possess purpose, passions, and the ways in which they care for other people. Whereas disillusionment only makes Voynitsky more bitter, it fuels Astrov's forestry work and interest in local geography.