Racial Slurs
Faulkner does not shy away from allowing his characters to fully express their racism. In the story “Pantaloon in Black” one of Faulkner’s many deeply racist denizens of the poor white area of Dixie commences the closest he’ll ever get to an intellectual musing about blacks by not only engaging the N-word, but preceding its use with reference to the entire race being damned. He then uses similes of the most basic type in an attempt to justify his prejudices:
“They look like a man and they walk on their hind legs like a man, and they can talk and you can understand them and you think they are understanding you, at least now and then. But when it comes to the normal human feelings and sentiments of human beings, they might just as well be a damn herd of wild buffaloes.”
"Lucas is as strong as a horse."
This metaphor is found in dialogue. Many of the characters in these stories—most, really—are simple country people whose pool of figurative expressions would likely be peppered with comparisons to rural living such as this. And, indeed, throughout the stories characters often reference things through a frame of comparison to that which they know; those things most familiar to them.
The Cage
In the story “The Old People” Cass tells his cousin Isaac that Sam Fathers “was bom in the cage and has been in it all his life; he knows nothing else.” The cage is metaphorical, of course, but springs from the literal cage of being born into the bondage of slavery which even emancipation does work as a key to open.
Simile as Source of Humor
While Faulkner’s mastery of figurative language usually serves a deeper purpose, he is not above playing around with the turn of a phrase for the simple sake of creating a smile on the reader’s lips such as this description of people looking a surrey crossing the town square which gave the
“illusion of flight and illicit holiday like a man on an excursion during his wife’s absence with his wife’s personal maid”
Metaphor as Character
A barely overheard offhand observation provides the opportunity Faulkner to delineate for readers a vision of a character fragmented not only by the use of metaphorical language, but a slightly unreliable narrator of that metaphorical description. The imperfect translation arrives courtesy of hearing Miss Sophonsiba say something, but missing out on some of the details due to extraneous noise:
“Something about Uncle Buck was a bee sipping from flower to flower and not staying long anywhere and all that stored sweetness to be wasted on Uncle Buddy’s desert air”
