Fatness
In the title story of this collection, the fat man is himself a metaphor. Indeed, fatness is a metaphor for the gluttony of capitalist excess. In other words, the literal quality of obesity is transformed into a metaphor of the symbolic reality of a system that can—but not necessarily does—wield literal influence over physicality. As one character despondently muses:
“to be fat is to be an oppressor, to be greedy, to be pre-revolutionary.”
Character Description
Sometimes a writer will dive right into the metaphorical end of the writing pool in the opening paragraph of a short story. This can be particularly effective for the purposes of establishing character quickly. When the character description is being formulated by another character writing in first-person, it is doubly effective since the metaphorical imagery offers insight into both at once. The author makes this choice in the first paragraph of the story “The Puzzling Nature of Blue.”
“Vincent is crying again. Bloody Vincent. Here I am, a woman of thirtyfive, and I still can’t handle a fool like Vincent. He’s like a yellow dog, one of those curs who hangs around your back door for scraps and you feed him once, you show him a little affection, and he stays there. He’s yours.”
The Narrator
“War Crimes” is another story delivered to the reader through a first person perspective. This particular narrator is especially fond of using metaphors and similes. More precisely, he is more than a particularly fond of using metaphor and simile to describe himself. The story opens with the narrator admitting that he knows he will be judged in time as a “tyrant, a psychopath, an aberrant accountant” but not as someone that “might have feelings other than those of a mad dog.” From that point, the narrative barrels inexorably toward the story’s—and the collection’s—final closing line:
“I am a freight train, black smoke curling back, thundering down the steel lines of terrible logic.”
Mime
“The Last Days of a Famous” is a series of sixteen short vignettes that make the title of the story not be a complete lie. Metaphor is dense throughout as the story illuminates how the act of pantomime is itself a sort of visualization of metaphor. Section 4 of the narrative, however, is almost nothing but literary metaphorical description engaging the power of the simile’s comparisons:
“As usual he attracted women who wished to still the raging storms of his heart. They attended his bed like highly paid surgeons operating on a difficult case. They were both passionate and intelligent. They did not suffer defeat lightly.”
A Return to Vincent
Vincent, the “yellow dog” previously described is also in that same story later the recipient of what may arguably be the collection’s most interesting simile. Some comparisons are straightforward enough and many, of course, seem to exist only for the purpose of the entertaining the author as he imagines reading scholarly papers trying to figure out its abstruse intent. The best strange similes, however, really seem to be those that on first reading make complete sense only to become less clear and a little more confusing with each return:
“Van Dogen walked the aisles of the vast warehouse. It took everything in Vincent to stop himself standing up. `Here I am. I’m a friend.’ He was like a man who jumps from a tall building because he is frightened of falling from it.”
