Code Words
Coded language is often used among certain groups to knowing refer to unwanted groups without actually coming out and identifying those groups. This use of metaphor usually begins in the early stages of oppressive movements and only lasts until those people using the code words feel comfortable to speak more openly about their prejudices and bigotry. Such is the case here involving a metaphorical term being applied in this case to Jewish people:
“Everybody’s been talking about the new element movin’ around.”
Urban Hunting
The setting is a commuter train populated by a cross section of the city. The perspective is a character named Newman, an important character to be sure, but hardly important in this case because he represents a type. A paranoid prejudicial predator surreptitiously peeking about for his prey:
“There sat a man whose type to him was like a rare clock to a collector…Probably he alone on this train knew that this gentleman with the square head and the fair skin was neither Swede, nor German, nor Norwegian, but a Jew.”
The Cleansing Rain
Biblically, almost, the city experiences a drought lasting forty days. The lack of precipitation affords the opportunity for some philosophizing in the narration. It is a literary trait not uncommon to Miller’s much more frequent and well-known work in the theater in which metaphor is equally used as a powerful tool:
“For nearly forty days the city had had no rain. It is an insidious pacifier, rain; the people stay at home and the pages of the precinct blotters do not turn so often. But when the sky stays as blue as it did this summer, day after sweltering day, and the humid air chokes a man out of his sleep, it is the streets and stoops of the city that become populated and the authority of the family disintegrates for a time.”
A Strange Simile
The simile is an odd literary device. Simply by inserting a “like” or an “as” one can construct a comparison that is clearly intended to drive home a point through familiarity to the reader. Sometimes, however, even when both ends of the comparison are familiar, the connection can still be difficult to make because something just seems out-of-sync or a little off. Such is the following example which is easily enough followed, but perhaps not so easily applied:
“As far as the eye could see the city was dead, and the green smell of the sea hovered along the sidewalks. Mr. Newman felt forced to walk; the mute height of the buildings moved him. He walked slowly, like a man who has used up his strength rushing to a sale, only to find all the goods sold.”
Newman’s Vision
A pair of glasses change everything for Newman. The title becomes applicable as the world comes into focus for the first time and truths which had been blurry sharpen into irrefutable truths. The novel turns, however, on the fact that the glasses do not just change how he sees the world, but how the world sees him. Almost as if foreseeing this, anxiety is the dominant emotion after their purchase, but before their use:
“The new glasses lay in his pocket like a small living animal. As though racing with the homeward rush of the train he kept trying to imagine an alternative to wearing glasses, but the closer he came to his station the more inevitable became the realization that without them he would soon find himself unable even to leave his house.”
