Characters Seeing Characters
One of the most effective uses of metaphorical imagery is to describe one character through the eyes of another. This is kind of like the two birds with one stone effect: you get insight into both the viewer and the person they are looking at:
She let her gaze rise woozily above the sparkling rhomboids of gaudy Phoenix and into the moonless dark, to where the face of Howard’s wife, Mary, a woman she’d never seen even in a shapshot, materialized out of the dark clouds like a picture in a developer’s tray.
The Communist
The story titled “Communist” features a character who is a self-described ideologue of that very political philosophy. He doesn’t seem much like the traditional view of a communist held by most Americans in 1961, however. Except, to the teenage son of the women he is dating:
“I’ll admit that I like him. He had something on his mind always. He was a labor man as well as a Communist and like to say the country was poisoned by the rich, and the strong men needed to bring it to life again”
Pop Culture
References to pop culture are beginning to make up a large percentage of metaphorical imagery in the world of modern fiction. A couple of generations of readers now have been raised on a steady diet of first-run TV shows followed by endless repeats and syndicated reruns. These tropes are now officially burned into the zeitgeist, already at the ready to be unholsters for a quick simile:
Roger is the friendly-funning neighbor in a family sitcom, although not that funny…And he is loathsome—though in subtle ways, like some TV actors Faith has known.
Historical Allusion
Likewise, cultural references back to an ancient past can be just as effective in describing modernity. It only works as long as the callback is immediately referenceable for modern readers, of course. Thanks to pop culture, most will have no trouble making this imagery come to life in their mind:
“Conquistadors came there in fifteen-ninety-something," she went on, casting a mischievous eye at Howard was thinking about the run-over rabbit and staring moodily out at a big cinema complex built to look like an Egyptian jukebox. A vast, unlined, untenanted expanse of asphalt lay between the theater and the highway.
“Rock Springs”
Metaphors is used throughout this particular story as a means of foreshadowing. The main character is desperately trying to put as much literal and figurative mileage between himself and the consequences of transacting business with a healthy pile of bad checks. As a result, the paranoia has him seeing signs in everything and nearly every action has a metaphorical dimension attached:
…we made love on the seat of a car in the Quality Court parking lot just as the sun was burning up on the Snake River, and everything seemed then like the end of the rainbow.
