Nature (metaphors)
The story is poetically filled with metaphors of nature objects and phenomena. “It was morning, and the new sun sparkled gold across the ripples of a gentle sea.” The “new sun” is an indicator of a new day starting, and for the seagulls around it was another chance “to come to dodge and fight for bits of food”.
At high speed (simile)
Jonathan Livingston is practicing all the time, as he wants to learn what he is capable of. Flying is for him a way of self-perceiving and realization, and his goal is to “climb to a thousand feet”, and “flick like fire into a wild tumbling spin” to the right. The trick of this upstroke is hard for him, but “ten times he tried, and all ten times, as he passed through seventy miles per hour, he burst into a churning mass of feathers, out of control, crashing down into the water”. Jonathan Livingston is full of fortitude, and in the end he achieved all his goals.
The cost of success (simile)
Jonathan Livingston had not given up his desire to fly at high speed, and “he tried again, rolling into his dive, beak straight down, wings full out and stable from the moment he passed fifty miles per hour”. Such attempts “took tremendous strength”, but it worked, and Jonathan had set a world speed record for seagulls. But his victory “was short-lived”, and he “snapped into that same terrible uncontrolled disaster”, and at ninety miles per hour “it hit him like dynamite”, and Jonathan “smashed down into a brickhard sea”.
