Metaphor as Philosophy
Sometimes, an author will look to metaphorical language to put across a certain philosophical outlook of a character or even the overall perspective of the book itself. One of those occasions is the following example in which the narrator first presents a wide perspective and then narrows the focus ever so slightly:
“So much of the world was governed by chance…Life was a swarm of accidents waiting in the treetops, descending upon any living thing that passed, ready to eat them alive. You swam in a river of chance and coincidence.”
Character Description
Similes are excellent vehicles for describing characters. Not just specifics, but the broader perspective was well. One can gain double the insight when the metaphor being used to describe one character originates from within another as it serves to tell the reader a little bit about both:
“It was an odd idea to have about someone he’d just met, but an unmistakable aura of resignation enveloped the man, as though he were one of those people depicted in cartoons who walked around with rain clouds over their heads”
Shifting Emotional Tone
Another effective technique for which authors engage metaphor is reveal a striking change of tone in outlook. In this example, the narrator is getting somewhat philosophical again, but this time the mood makes an abrupt shift and the author inserts a metaphor to make the emotional extent of this shift clearer:
“Just when normal life felt almost possible—when the world held some kind of order, meaning, even loveliness (the prismatic spray of light through an icicle; the stillness of a sunrise), some small thing would go awry and the veil of optimism was torn away, the barren world revealed.”
Setting
Metaphor is not just for abstractions. Sometimes a very specific and concrete comparison is made through simile to situate within the reader’s mind a particular and precise image of the setting of the scene:
“A granite ledge swelled from the ground there, gray and narrow and barnacled with moss, cresting among the trees and submerging near the road like the hump of a whale breaking the surface of the earth.”
The Poetry of Metaphor
One of the reasons that authors like using metaphors so much is they offer a way to sneak into a little poetry into prose. Prose, generally speaking, tends to be much more literal as it seeks to duplicate reality. Poetry, of course, often just thumbs its nose at anything having to do with realism. The metaphor—especially the comparisons offered by simile—provides prose writers the chance to drop a sentence into a paragraph that might actually be more at home in a poem. Such as this example which even comes close to rhyming:
“She waited for the sound to stop, but it went on and on, as quiet as the rustle of the new leaves on the apple trees.”
