Blue Ocean
The entire plot revolves around a metaphor. The head of marketing explains the business strategy known as a “Blue Ocean” operating within a “Red Ocean” to her protégé. "In contested markets, the water is red from companies fighting for market share and devouring each other. Cirque du Soleil was blue because no other circus could compete with it. Nothing like it had ever come before.” Thus, the term “Blue Ocean” is a metaphor for discovering a new business model operating within a larger existing paradigm.
Susan
Susan is the narrator’s oldest friend. Her behavior, philosophies, quirks, and assorted other attributes are constantly being referenced by the narrator whether Susan is actually in the scene with her or not. For instance, “Susan heard phone messages not as an invitation to call back but as something to wait out like a mosquito in your bedroom: irritating, sure, but it’ll die eventually.” As it happens, she is not actually present for much of the book. Despite this absence, descriptive similes offering insight into her even the smallest details of Susan’s life wind up making her arguably the most sharply defined character in the story.
Lindsey’s Apartment
Two similes combine together to present an instant snapshot of what entering the apartment of a woman named Lindsey is like. “Lindsey’s apartment smelled like a Yankee Candle and looked like a Barbie Dreamhouse.” These are the types of comparisons that one either immediately understands perfectly or will be left trying to figure out forever. The author is depending upon consumer experience and familiarity to drive home the effect of the comparison and it is likely to be effective for some time. In the long run, however, this strategy can prove less effective. While Barbie may still be around a century from now, Yankee Candle could become an obscure reference within the author’s own lifetime.
Geometry
At the opposite end of the spectrum is the narrator’s description of what happens when she spots her boyfriend with another woman and paranoid jealously kicks into overdrive. “A tesseract kind of happened in my brain when I saw them together. Four dimensions of simultaneous understanding. I cubed the cube of all the men I’d ever known and drawn a speed-of-light conclusion.” Whereas literally, almost everyone in America is familiar with Barbie, the number familiar with the geometric definition of tesseract likely pales considerably. The contextual addition certainly helps to facilitate the meaning the narrator is driving at, but it is still likely that the mind of many readers will immediately leap to the Avengers movies, And that won’t be of much help at all.
The Downfall
For much of the book the narrator, Casey Pendergast, is riding high. She’s got a good and meeting interesting people and it even turns out that her the scene with her boyfriend and the mysterious woman wasn’t worth the whole tesseract metaphor. Everything that rises must converge, however, and the convergence of a series of failures and losses sends her on a relentless downward spiral. Her philosophical conclusion “Grief, it knocks you flat, and never in the way you expect” is not in respect to any literal death but the mourning of the figurative demise of that earlier and much happier version of herself.
