The Long Dark Night of Awareness
The protagonist, Joe Chip, is ultimately a kind of tragic hero who just doesn’t possess the power to do much more than rage against the machine. The dark side of humanity is too overwhelming and is especially powerful when it doesn’t seem like the dark side at all:
“He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.”
Miss Wirt and Mrs. Frick
Mrs. Frick is the secretary to Mr. Runciter and Miss Wirt is the woman who wants to see him. Metaphor is engaged to delineate the physical aspects of the secretary. The description is the author’s however, and not seen though the perspective Miss Wirt. And therein lies a great difference: we know much more about Frick than we do Wirt.
His secretary tottered to one side, and a plump woman rolled into the office. Her head, like a basketball, bobbled up and down; her great round body propelled itself toward a chair, and there, at once, she seated herself, narrow legs dangling.
The Girl
She is described as looking as though she has just gotten out of bed, as being disordered, and resenting the very fact of the day. But there is definitely something special about her in a way that can only be served through metaphor:
But beside him lounged a long-legged girl with brilliant, tumbling black hair and eyes; her intense, distilled beauty illuminated that part of the room, igniting it with heavy, sullen fire.
Darkness
Darkness is the defining metaphor of modern life. Once you start looking for it in fiction, it even seems to start showing up in every piece of non-fiction you read. It is a metaphor heavy with use throughout the book, but most appreciably so in this example:
Darkness hummed about him, clinging to him like coagulated, damp, warm wool.
The Opposite of Entropy
On a certain level, the narrative is all about the process of entropy and how it can be avoided. Must everything eventually break down and cease to be? Entropy would be immediate for nearly everything on the planet were it not for some form of metabolic processes and so metabolism is also a significant operating agent:
Metabolism, he reflected, is a burning process, an active furnace. When it ceases to function, life is over.
