A Good Question
Interestingly enough, one of the last classroom lessons described in the book involves identifying metaphors and similes. The question put to the class by the teacher is simple: what specific figure of speech is demonstrated in the following passage?
“The world is only a bottomless sewer where formless creatures creep and writhe upon mountains of muck.”
A Bad Explanation
Having received one wrong answer—a student identifies the passage only as a main clause—and one correct answer regarding the passage above. All seems fine and dandy, and then the teacher decides to dive a little deeper in his instruction, swimming toward another metaphor. This example, however, is less than a brilliant addition to the lesson:
“Yes, and we’d say an extended metaphor, because it stretches over a whole lexical field—this could be a called a lexical field of decay.”
Caffeine on the Battlefield
It’s not a French habit alone. Head into school in America and the following metaphor is apt once you make it to the teacher’s lounge. Of course, things could be worse. Some schools perhaps have teachers already taking things to a level beyond mere caffeine:
“within these walls it is a recognized fact that coffee is the nerve tissue of the war.”
Figuratively Speaking
The author saves one of the best metaphorical images for almost the last page. A simile is designed to cash in on a reader’s knowledge through the familiar image that the unfamiliar image is compared to. Sometimes this fails as a result of the author trying to be a little too clever and overlooking the necessity for that familiarity. And then sometimes a writer steps to the plate and hits the ball out of the park:
“At that signal, Alyssa stepped to the front of the stage. Thus elevated, she stood four yards tall, like a question mark grown large by eating all the questions it had ever punctuated.”
Callback
That is almost but not quite the last metaphorical image in the book. It is used on the occasion of Alyssa stepping to the stage to give a little speech at the end of the year. She launches into what sounds like a horrible diatribe of nihilistic insults, but it is only to set up a callback to a lesson recently learned:
“The world is nothing but a bottomless sewer, where formless creatures creep and writhe on mountains of muck. But in this world there is one thing holy and sublime: that is the union of two of these imperfect, frightful beings.”
