Third Person Autobiography
Adams’ decision to write about himself in the third person perspective perhaps allows for him to be a bit more fanciful and verbose in his use of metaphor than if he were writing from the first person. The distancing of the perspective is what separates this rich sentence from seeming a bit too preciously self-aware:
“The atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial, revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped, from his greatest grandmother's birth, in the odor of political crime.”
Meta-Simile
Adams prefigures postmodernism’s love everything meta in this example of a simile in which he then comments upon the use of the simile itself:
“He dropped back on Quincy like a lump of lead; he rebounded like a football, tossed into space by an unknown energy which played with all his generation as a cat plays with mice. The simile is none too strong.”
The Black District
Adams wields metaphor like a writer of apocalyptic fiction when describing a trip up to London through Birmingham and the Black District—which is so frightening that he runs from as it a boy and only later comes back for a practical education:
“The plunge into darkness lurid with flames; the sense of unknown horror in this weird gloom which then existed nowhere else, and never had existed before, except in volcanic craters”
German Education
The educational system of Germany receivers a withering appraisal by Adams as he recognizes it for the institutional ideological state apparatus which it is, though perhaps missing the point that such is not limited to just Prussian inculcation:
“All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes.”
It's Simple...a Little Too Simple
Adams levels a warning in the form of proverbial metaphor for those who get excited when the solution to a problem seems as simple as running water:
“simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.”
