Funeral Ritual
When one thinks about it, the ritualistic behavior of some funeral rites are, well, kind of crazy. Or at least ridiculous. Or at least questionable. Roth goes in close for an examination of the true emotional resonance of the burial of the dead and delivers a metaphorical gut punch:
“Lonny stepped up to the grave first. But once he'd taken a clod of dirt in his hand, his entire body began to tremble and quake, and it looked as though he were on the edge of violently regurgitating.”
Character Description
Of course, when it comes to the use of similes, they are perhaps no more useful than in creating a little shorthand to character description. One or two judicious uses of precise figurative language can often convey more than an entire page of dialogue:
“He spoke like a Southerner, but very matter-of-factly, very precisely, more like a pedantic schoolteacher than a physical laborer.”
The End of the Road
That funeral rite at the beginning is really the end. The man being buried is the protagonist of the story and the rest of the book traces his trek to that end capable of causing a young man to quake and tremble. At one point, Roth engages simile to a more poetic extent to analyze the downward spiral from one’s peak to one’s slow end:
“Even in retirement he'd continued to have the air of an omnipotent being dedicated all his life to an important mission, but in those eleven months before he died he seemed pierced by bewilderment, dazed by his diminishment...”
Sure, Good Health Now...but Later?
Over a two-decade passage of time, the protagonist muses upon his luck. In another poetic connection of figurative imagery, the author illuminates both the pleasures of good health and the apprehension that comes with time:
“Twenty-two years passed. Twenty-two years of excellent health and the boundless self-assurance that flows from being fit — twenty-two years spared the adversary that is illness and the calamity that waits in the wings.”
Metaphor as Theme
Roth was over seventy when he wrote the novel and would live just a little more than a decade after publication. Since Roth is notorious for being one of the most autobiographical of American writers of fiction, it is natural to assume that at least at some point deep down he was writing about his own feelings of slipping into the twilight years. Especially with the following quite simple metaphor which seems to efficiently encapsulate the story's overarching theme:
“Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.”
