Caviar
Elder son Daniel has a peculiar fondness for caviar. He eats it for a snack in the middle of the night and even uses it as a topping for pancakes. His mom observes that caviar is not a snack to be consumed like a glutton, but a delicacy that increases its appeal by not eating it. His mom—and her husband—should take pains to apply this understanding of caviar to its greater symbolic meaning because it is exactly their inability to gorge on those aspects of adult behavior best enjoyed as rare delicacies which is at the root of much of their problem.
“I AM my cooking.”
The novel begins with a husband criticizing the dinner his wife has just cooked and less than five pages in the wife is holding a sharp knife to the husband’s throat and drawing blood. Elaine’s metaphorical realization of herself as the thing is prefaced by the grabbing of the knife and profane warning against criticizing her cooking. Although blood is drawn, it is actually difficult to tell how serious this argument is meant to be taken as well as how sincere Elaine is with her assertion. The metaphor is flatly stated far too early in the novel to tell for sure. Readers may have to wait until the end to determine whether it is true or ironic.
Fire
Paul and Elaine burn down their house and the flames consume it. Everything of importance that is related in the novel essentially starts from this single moment of childishly gleeful insanity. Thus the fire that will eventually prove to consume the rest of their lives can be read a metaphor for literally everything else that consumes their desires and fears, love and hatred, conformity and non-conformity and, ultimately, narcissistic self-indulgence for which they pay the highest price.
"like she's a Big Mac"
The simile here describes a comparison that Elaine is making about the manner in which Paul is performing a particular sex act. The word “eating” links what Paul is doing to the Big Mac and is a significant example of the use of a simile because it helps to convey pervasiveness of consumerism within the middle-class suburban milieu which the act of burning down their own house was intended to revolt against. But even during moments of sexual intimacy, the presence of advertising, commercial and the daily intrusion into life wrought by corporate America is impossible to escape. Elaine has so be reduced by the commodification of existence that she cannot even come up with a metaphor for a sex act without resorting to it.
The Crumbs on Elaine's Bare Bottom
During a sexual encounter, the perfect “Stepford Wife” alternative to Elaine, Pat, begins cleaning the crumbs off Elaine’s backside with her tongue. She explains very simply: “I sweep. I sweep every day. I’m sweeping all the time.” If Elaine is her cooking—and she may or not be, remember—then Pat is her sweeping. Only this assertion carries almost no room for doubt or ambiguity. Pat and her husband are presented as a kind of alternative to Paul and Elaine in that they seem to have fully embraced both the good and bad points of living in suburbia and have found a way to reconcile them. They are not perfect, of course, but the image of always sweeping things away—even crumbs off the behind of a same-sex partner in adultery—is likely a pretty apt metaphor for how Pat has managed this reconciliation to the point where seems perfect to eyes that don’t pry too closely. Equally true is the metaphorical implication of Elaine's bare bottom being messy with crumbs as it becomes something of a literalization of her previous assertion about what she is.
