Metaphor and Irony
Sometimes when you use similes, you get two literary devices for the price of one. For instance, metaphor and irony both working their humor at once, though not necessarily in the same direction. The metaphor here is obvious, the irony perhaps less so—Edison himself actually invented almost nothing that he gets credit for:
Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he’ll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas…Edison.
Big Cast
This is a big novel—even Stephen King would recognize this as a major work effort. And as a big book, it features a big cast. On occasion, the author seems to make a winking nod toward the reader about this particular aspect:
The family Altamira is vast enough to constitute an ethnic group unto itself, and all of them live in the same building—practically in the same room.
The Trials of Goto Denga
One very significant member of that last cast is a member of the Imperial Japanese military, Lt. Goto Denga. Goto’s story alone would have made a great novel, though admittedly one of the most depressing novels ever written. The following metaphorical image actually represents a high point in his long, horrific tale:
But the volatile chemicals in the oil have gotten into his body like fire. It feels as though a hot spatula is being shoved between his scalp and his skull.
Labor and Economics
Goto Denga learns much from his travails. For instance, the truth about how money is made, produced and works. A rough road to survival tends to have this effect:
“Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work.”
Stone Cutters
What is the dream of the middle class? To smooth rough edges, soften sharp points and look like every overpriced, undersized diamond in the display case. Just like the diamond industry, the middle class is presented as a scam hardly worth the investment:
Middle-class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones.
