The Silent One
The use of such a limited vocabulary prohibits extensive use of individual figurative imagery like metaphor and simile. On the other hand, the comparison offered through the simile is one of the strongest tools available when writing for children. So though they occur, it is not frequently. The result is less a school of similes than a single class:
“This one is
quiet as a mouse."
Fish
Metaphor is more widely engaged in the book to suit a broader perspective. For instance, the very title turns out to be metaphorical. The fish—red, blue, whatever—are a metaphor for every type of creature, especially humans, that populate the earth in a variety of forms which differentiate them from one another.
The Zans
The extremely tall and likely quite heavy Zans is popular with the narrator and his family because they can use its horn to open cans. (Some younger readers may not realize that once upon a time there was no such things as pop-top cans and an opener was required for every one of them.) This makes the Zans a perfect metaphor for those inconvenient people whose company we put up with because they provide a useful service, at least temporarily.
The One Who Doesn’t Knock
On the page opposite the creature who is quiet as a mouse is the one who yells. The upper half of his body reaches from the bottom to almost the top of the page and his very angry head is huge with dramatic lightning bolts around it suggestive of his outburst. He has no name, but metaphorically consider him the opposite of a Zans: one of those people you have no trouble avoiding or insulting because he brings absolutely nothing to the party.
Marching Sheep
A line of sheep stretching across two pages marches beneath the moon as the two kids look out upon them from brilliantly illuminated window in the house behind. One immediately suspects this imagery is going to lead some sort of observation that connects counting sheep to falling asleep. Instead, the sheep retain their traditional metaphorical symbolism of acting in union without individual thought or action as the narrator observes of their homogenized method of locomotion to get from near to far:
“I would never walk.
I would take a car.”
