Everything is Amazing
The story is about a boy kept in a concentration camp as a prisoner throughout his young life until he escapes. For a seventeen-year-old boy who has never been outside the fence of such misery, almost everything takes on a metaphorical aspect of greatness beyond its literal reality:
“there was a house close by. He could see it among the trees…a large house and beautiful to look at, almost like a church.”
The Girl on Fire
A beautiful girl captures David’s attention and he is so overcome by the way that her movement is similar to a flower swaying in the wind that this metaphor becomes her identity. Even when a horrible accident results in her almost going up in flames:
“She was burning…the girl! It was not the shed, it was the girl they were talking about—the little who looked so like a flower was inside that fire!”
Darkness
Darkness is the defining metaphor of literature of the 20th century. It seems to have really kicked into high gear, however, following the revelation of the true depths of evil to which man could sink when the secrets of Nazi atrocities came to light:
“All the coldness and darkness and infinite loneliness of the world filled David’s mind until it seemed ready to burst.”
A Literal Mind
Metaphor cannot be an easy concept to understand for someone who has spent their entire life cloistered in an environment where concrete reality is just another word for daily survival. The effect of living without exposure to figurative language is demonstrated in David’s relationship with his dog, King:
“David had heard people say a dog was `as clever as a human being,’ but that, he thought, was nonsense. A dog was a dog, and a man was a man, and you could not as clever as something quite different.”
What is Music?
While in the concentration camp, a man once tried to explain to David what music was. How do you explain music to a person who has never heard it? The moment of realization becomes a moment of sublimity for David who can only describe it in the most poet of metaphoric imagery:
“David thought that if a ray of light from the sun could have made a drop of water speak, its voice would have been like the clearest notes of the violin.”
