Absence Makes Everything Look Different
Renton leaves London and just three months away is enough to make it seem changed:
“It’s as if everything is a copy of what you knew before, similar, yet somehow lacking in its usual qualities, a bit like the way things are in a dream.”
Has This Ever Happened to You?
Renton bemoans the way his parents treat him worse than his friends and then demonstrates the universality of the shared experience that the friends you know and your friends your parents know never seem to be quite the same people:
“On the other hand Begbie…crazy psycho Beggars, is held up as an archetypal model of manhood.”
Yeah, that's Pretty Incompatible
Davie explains throughout metaphor why he is no longer Frances, revealing the efficiency of similes to cut right to the point of the matter rather than wasting words explaining what made them incompatible as a couple:
“She only really saw me as a babysitter and a wallet.”
Rut of the Living Dead
Renton, Spud and the gang are full-blown into their drug-fueled lifestyle in which, whether manically or ghost-like, they don’t come out to face the world until well into the night.
“They were like vampires, living a largely nocturnal existence, completely out of synchronisation with most of the other people who inhabited the tenements and lived by a rota of sleep and work.”
Spud
One of the most memorable uses of metaphor for the purpose of character description comes almost at the end with a particularly brutally honest assessment of the essential quality of of the surprisingly complicated Spud:
“Even in his Ma’s womb, you would have had to define Spud less as a foetus, more as a set of dormant drug and personality problems.”
