“Then he was no longer friendly and his voice like winter frost.”
This is an example of choosing a simile that integrates perfectly with perspective. The novel is told through the first person point of view of the young son of Joe and Marian Starrett and though he is writing from a point of maturity well after the events being described, the voice of narration is always consistent with that of Bob as events unfold. Thus lacking the ability to craft more creative or original figurative imagery, Bob instead remains limited to the kind of experience and sophistication of his young age. Thus, what could be more tangible for comparing both a sense of coldness and hardness than the effects of winter frost which Bob would be more closely attuned to than an adult on the sheer basis of physicality.
Cooking
Cooking—more precisely the domesticating aspect of preparing meals—becomes an insistent metaphor centered around Marian. Important to remember is that Marian may live on the frontier now, but she grew up in the much more refined and domesticated milieu of the East. And so preparing meals becomes a metaphor for a more civilized way of living. Notably, her most obvious failure to maintain this ritualistic devotion is when she allows her pie to burn during the struggle in which Joe and Shane are almost reduced to primitive archetypes in their combined effort to remove the stump.
The Stump
Interestingly, Marian seems to be unconsciously projecting her views about cooking into Bob. A paragraph that begins with Bob using a simile to describe the stump as something that “stuck out like an old scarred sore” on the farm ends with an indirect allusion to the cooking metaphor when he observes that the stump seemed big enough to him at the time that it could have served as a dinner table were it only smoothed out; a phrase which is code for civilizing the stump to make it appropriate for such a domesticated use.
“Shane’s voice flicked in a whiplash of contempt.”
Another good simile that speaks to a certain age and particular kind of experience. A kid on the frontier would easily recognize the sound of a whip lashing through the air, but it is “of contempt” that is most telling. By this point in the novel, Bob has already matured beyond where he was at the opening. And this observation occurs during one of the book’s most tension-filled moments. It’s clear Bob doesn’t quite understand the details of what is going on, but he’s intuitive enough to sense that the interaction which has spurred Shane to such a visceral display of emotion is a turning point.
Shane the Christ
Many have posited the interpretation that Shane is a metaphorical Christ figure who mysteriously arrives, sets things right and just as mysterious disappears on his way to the next town that needs him. This may seem like a stretch until you get to the end of the novel. There the reader is confronted with the most striking evidence that this is not reader-response, but authorial intention:
“He’s not gone. He’s here, in this place, in this place he gave us. He’s all around us and in us and he always will be.”
The argument against Shane as a metaphorical Christ figure gets much harder to make once you reach that point in the novel.
