“such walls as in time may linger as a mere fable.”
The second sentence of the novel presents a simile delivered without context: “And the tall walls of the commercial heart of an American city of perhaps 400,000 inhabitants—such walls as in time may linger as a mere fable.” It is an odd choice for an opening to a novel. Even aside from any narrative context, it has a disconnected quality that almost seems like two different ideas trapped together within a single thought. Within this second sentence is a foreshadowing of not just the singular tragedy of the story, but the potential tragic fate facing an America personified by that single individual. With this strangely composed simile comparing the sturdiness of concrete walls to the image of the nebulous reality of a fiction, the author subtly intimates that the fate which lies in store for his protagonist could become the fate lying in store for America if it does not assert itself by reaching for a firmer moral grasp that pure capitalist dreams.
Bad Girl
The metaphor “bad girl” is used only a handful of times and each use presents the phrase in a different way, revealing its metaphorical power at that time. For back then, of course, to be a “bad girl” meant to be a woman who sleeps with a man before marriage. The first time Robert uses the phrase in this way, it is with a certain defiance as if admitting it for to herself for the first time as she is overcome with desire for Clyde. The second time she uses it, however, the metaphorical concept has shifted ever so slightly. Now she submits to the inexorability of logic that she will to be a bad girl if she hopes to keep Clyde to herself. This moral aspect of what was essentially a euphemism is juxtaposed with its first and only other appearance in the text: when Bella’s father asks playfully upon arriving home from a business: “And how’s the bad girl been behaving herself?” The juxtaposition of meaning now enhances the metaphorical status of its later self-reverential uses by Roberta to a significant degree.
“like a huge and basalt headland above a troubled and angry sea, was the trial itself”
Imagery of water also penetrate the text to make its ultimate connection with the tragic and ironic showdown with conscience and fate on the lake. Clyde’s temperament is described as “fluid and unstable as water” and in this simile the watery symbolism puts the centerpiece of his life into place as the final connection tying the fluidity of that state of mind with the permanence of his actions.
Silent Hall
One two separate occasions Clyde’s brain is compared a silent hall. Or, more precisely, that part of his brain which allowed him to contemplate the darkest aspects of his desires without interference with the moral conscience sealed safely outside this small netherworld free.
"She's a bird that way—never gets enough.”
This comment—part of offhand banter between Clyde and another fellow—referencing a female character only just introduced by way of description is an example of the bird imagery which saturates the narrative. References to birds are as a thick as a flock of starlings and cover just about every possible literary device, including metaphors.
