Alfred's movement as drowning
Franzen uses metaphor to create the picture of Alfred, old and uncoordinated with his illness. “In the lunging manner of a man floundering in the water, Alfred fell upon Chip and grabbed Chip’s hand and wrist as if they were a rope he’d been thrown” (16). Here, Alfred clings to his son like a lifeline, revealing that Alfred fears he is getting closer to death. This image foreshadows Alfred's actual fall into the water off of the cruise ship.
Free time as a silent alarm
Franzen uses both metaphor and simile to show how having excessive time on his hands and nothing to do terrifies Alfred. “He’d had his nap and there would be no local news until five o’clock. Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred. It was the alarm bell of anxiety. It was like one of those big cast-iron dishes with an electric clapper that send schoolchildren into the street in fire drills.” (3) The silence and loneliness of Alfred’s boring life are likened to a fire alarm here, showing it has the same startling and fear-inducing effect.
Hoarding as a guerilla action
Enid’s hoarding in her home is likened to a guerilla action, in order to show how she does it behind the back of her husband and the government she thinks is coming for her. This metaphor shows how Enid has been forced to become a rebel in her own home, unable to maintain the home to her husband’s satisfaction while keeping the junk that contains her own memories.
Parkinson's Disease as the woods
Alfred's Parkinson's and memory loss are likened to a forest, as he gets lost whenever he comes to a new situation. “He began a sentence: ‘I am--’ but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he’d entered, he would realize that the crumbs he’d dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft darting things which he couldn’t quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seemed as if they were the darkness as if the darkness weren’t uniform, weren’t an absence of light but a teeming and corpuscular thing” (11). This metaphor paints a bleak picture of Alfred's mind and shows how cloudy and depressed his illness makes him.
Limited Reserves of Sophistication
“Gary wished that all further migration to the coasts could be banned and all midwesterners encouraged to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely civilized in perpetuity.” (195) This quote shows Gary comparing midwestern dowdiness to a natural resource; if people in the rural midwest stay poor and behind the times, people like Gary would be able to look more sophisticated in contrast. There is only so much style and money to go around before the bar is set again and it becomes the new normal, so the “wilderness of taste” of the midwest is a “strategic national reserve of cluelessness” whose benefits can be drawn upon by the posh upper-class members like Gary.
