A source of life and death (metaphor)
In the first chapter, the narrator tells about the place where he was born. It was a ruined and decayed town, and the inhabitants would have left it long ago, but they had no place to go. The narrator in details depicts the environments and stops on the Choptank river “which runs through it, from which they take abundance of shad and herring, and plenty of ague and fever”. Metaphorically depicting the role of the river to the local people, the narrator wants to say that along with fish, which was the source of food and therefore life; the river at the same time was a source of death as the water was dirty and bacteria of different diseases lived in it.
Slavery as an alive creature (metaphor)
In many instances, the narrator refers to slavery as to an alive creature: “slavery had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me; it converted the mother that bore me, into a myth; it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world.” The personifications used help the reader to better understand the metaphoric representation of slavery, the laws of which are beyond humanity.
Talking tombs (metaphor)
The narrator describes in details everything he sees in the Col. Lloyd Ownings, and the cemetery does not escape from his attention: “Vast tombs, embowered beneath the weeping willow and the fir tree, told of the antiquities of the Lloyd family, as well as of their wealth.” The beauty and significance of the tombs shows that these buried people were wealthy and their children could afford such graves. And he unpurposely reminds the grave of his mother which looked like “a grave of the dead at sea, unmarked, and without stone or stake.”
Dark in soul (metaphor)
Describing a slaveholder, Capt. Anthony in particular, the narrator tells that a slave holder becomes a victim of slavery as well as a slave himself. This is supported by the statement that “A man’s character greatly takes its hue and shape from the form and color of things about him” – and as a slaveholder is surrounded black people he becomes black himself, but only inside. His character becomes harsh and even merciless.
Col. Lloyd (metaphor)
The narrator has witnessed a lot of scenes of whipping during his slave years at the Lloyd estate, but there was one which impressed him particular. There was a slave who had been looking for the master’s horses for many years, and once he dared to say something to Lloyd, which did not show any disrespect but he only said that he was doing his best. And for this “impudence” he was whipped by the Colonel himself: “the spectacle of an aged man—a husband and a father—humbly kneeling before a worm of the dust, surprised and shocked me at the time”. A warm of the dust refers to Col. Lloyd.
