Opening Line
The book begins with metaphor. The opening line of the first chapter sounds literal enough—if implausibly hyperbolic—but it is pure metaphor. And a very effective one at that, boiling down one of the most complicated wars in recent memory to an essence that will soon be quite easily explained:
“The war in Zagreb began over a pack of cigarettes.”
Life During Wartime
The war is described through the perspective of a child. And so, like most everything else, the horrific reality of the world is distilled into a game. The irony that the “blockade” designed to hold back the Serbian military is made out sandbags is not lost upon even a child’s understanding, but nevertheless those very same children adapt so rapidly that within a week of construction the sandbags are being used for a “game” of war. The blockade
“begged to be climbed, so tall and alluring it might as well have been a jungle gym.”
Is There Even a Literary Term for This?
Metaphor in the form of simile is a supremely powerful literary device; of the most powerful. It can do so many things: make a comparison easier to understand, intensify irony, convey hyperbole or understatement. Or, as in this case, simile can do whatever the literary term is for that situation which makes a reader involuntarily stop for just a moment to try to understand the shock of what they just read:
“the noise that came out of the AK-47 didn’t sound like a shot. It sounded like a laugh.”
Bart Simpson Gets This
The author engages a direct metaphor that achieves almost the same thing, but in a distinctly different way. In describing how another character is clearing away what has been written on a chalkboard the narrator describes the effect quite effectively. Try not visualizing this image the next time you witness the event:
“soon she began to swipe at the board, initing an angry cloud of eraser dust.”
Ethnic Cleansing
Just as the opening lines are pure metaphor, the underlying traction of the narrative is based on a metaphor. In this case a metaphor that has since come into common usage as a synonym for something for more horrific than it sounds. At one point, the narrative conveys this chasm by forcing the reader—who may well be so familiar with the term that it really doesn’t seem as bad as its intent—to see it through a child’s eyes. And in that moment, the true inexplicable abomination of this metaphor for the much uglier word of genocide becomes chillingly clear as she describes an angry man on television pounding his fists to the rhythm of his speech as he is:
“saying something about cleansing the land, repeating it over and over.”
