The Girl in the Picture
Ever look through your photographs and wonder about the lives of those anonymous people in the background? Well, the author of this book clearly has and he made his protagonist one of those background characters. She muses about how her life has been detailed to an extent potentially across the world:
“Just by virtue of being in a certain place at a certain time, I’m stitched forever into the background of some stranger’s life tapestry…a painted prop, part of the `local color.’”
Meta-Metaphor
The protagonist is browsing in a bookstore and randomly comes across the book she wrote. The metaphorical language used to describe her book sounds remarkably like the book in her description of the book she wrote appears:
“All of the illustrations…were so precise and clean it was like an architect had drawn them. They were so colorful and intricate.”
Architecture
The reference to architecture in the above example is not random. As the title of this work suggests, construction is used metaphorically as a foundation of its overarching theme. A much more precise example will provide greater insight into this foundation:
“There was a building…Having been built at a time when cheap interiors and shoddy materials were essentially impossible to find, it had managed to stand for decades with only the barest minimum of maintenance. Like its owner (a tired lonely old woman)”
“The Moby Dick Vacation”
What comes to mind when seeing the phrase quoted above? Could be a number of things, of course, but certainly amongst them would be an adventure-themed vacation involving recreating the Ahab’s quest for the white whale. The author goes in a different direction, however, which leads closer to metaphor than even that particular form of the literal. When the character in the panel thinks “Maybe this is finally the big `Moby Dick’ vacation…being stuck on a plane is the only way I’ll force myself into it” the meaning transforms the very act of reading Melville’s epic novel into a metaphor for Ahab’s obsessive quest.
Branford the Bee
Branford the Bee is often dismissed or understood by many readers and some reviewers, but is arguably the most essential character in this work. He appears in many guises from being the star of a bedtime story to the star of his own comic book to the inspiration for a newspaper called The Daily Bee. He spends time trapped in a building until the opportunity for freedom arrives in the form of an open window. Branford is sex-obsessed drone suffering from existential angst. He is metaphorically the agent of cross-pollination tying the whole thing together.
