The 1950’s
When the talk turns to returning America to a greatness it once hand, what is usually meant by that is the 1950’s when America was undisputed king of the world. But the rosy tint of nostalgia blurs an authentic view of that period in which the means of enjoying greatness was not exactly distributed equally and equitably:
“that era, for all the sunniness it retains in our nostalgias, was also a time of unsettling darkness. We had to deal with McCarthyism and witch hunts.”
The Snow
Snow has magical powers, even among those who live in climates where it is not a rare occurrence. Stick around long enough in any one place and eventually you will become one of those people who will one day talk about that one time it snowed with an unusual vigor:
“He could remember six of his eleven winters on the earth, and there had never been snow like this. This was snow out of movies about the Yukon that he watched in the Venus. This was like the great Arctic blizzards in the stories of Jack London that he read in the library on Garibaldi Street.”
The Influence of Hollywood
The book tells the story of a young man whose life is punctuated with references to movies and comic books. A very useful tool when it comes to metaphor is alluding to pop culture. It makes people seem more real and relatable because most people regularly reference pop culture in everyday discourse. This is a good lesson to learn: never trust someone who doesn’t routinely punctuate their conversation with pop culture:
“What if he’s Svengali, he thought, the bearded guy in the movie who could hypnotize people? Or like Fagin in Oliver Twist, who made the kids steal for him?”
The Life of an Altar Boy
Metaphor is also efficiently exercised when it seamlessly fits into the action surrounding it. The example below could easily be rewritten to retain its metaphorical quality, but using imagery that is distinctly out of sync:
“This was the last mass of the day, and so he went back to the altar to extinguish the two candles with a long-handled device the altar boys had named the `holy snuffer.’ The old women were gone. They seemed to have ascended into the darkness like the waxy smoke from the candles after he capped them with the brass bell at the end of the snuffer.”
The War
For a very long time, whenever people in America spoke simply of “the war” everyone knew the war it being referenced was World War II. All wars change society to a degree, but only the Civil War represents a portrait of America as something completely different from what it was before more fittingly than World War II. It only changed everything for everybody, but for many the change was intensely personal:
“Father Heaney never talked about the war. But Michael was sure the war hung over him like a dark cloud; after all, less than two years ago, he was giving the last rites to dying soldiers.”
