Opening Lines
The novel begins on a note of imagery. The opening lines use imagery to create a sense of place. This is significant because the atmosphere in which the primary location is set will be of great significance.
“The noise was ended now. The smoke drifted like thin, gray wisps of fog above the tortured earth and the shattered fences and the peach trees that had been whittled into toothpicks by the cannon fire.”
Comparative Species
The book is heavy with the use of similes as figurative language. This preponderance is related to a large degree upon the circumstances of the narrative needing to compare alien species with humans. The difficulty of describing something nobody has ever seen is often addressed through such use of simile:
“And as he mopped his face, quite suddenly he knew what it was that had disturbed him about the traveler. Despite his bedraggled clothes and his dusty shoes, which attested to long walking, despite the heat of this time-before-a-rain, the stranger was not sweating. He appeared as fresh and cool as if he had been lying at his ease beneath a tree in springtime.”
The True Face of an Alien
It is not just the lack of perspiration which gives away alien life forms. The protagonist, Enoch, comes to develop a close friendship with an unnamed alien to whom he gives the name Ulysses. Ulysses at first hides his true appearance and the shock of revelation makes effective use of metaphorical imagery:
“Ulysses had reached up and pulled the split and loosened mask away, revealing a bullet head without a hair upon it- and the painted face. A face like a wild and rampaging Indian, painted for the warpath, except that here and there were touches of the clown, as if the entire painting job had been meant to point up the inconsistent grotesqueries of war.”
Enoch Outside Inside
Enoch is a veteran of the Civil War who has managed to reach the age of 124 without seeming to age more than a year per decade or so. Despite his soldier background, however, he projects a definite anti-war philosophical view. Except when only his only very occasional contacts with humans means two neighboring males hellbent on abusing a member of the family:
"You told me that I had the devil in me. Raise your hand against that girl once more and I promise you I'll show you just how much devil there is in me."
Cosmic Philosophy
The novel is categorized, aptly enough, as science fiction. Still, there is another way to classify the story contained within this narrative. It belongs equally to that less rigidly constructed genre of the novel of ideas. Those ideas are somewhat summed in the metaphor which succinctly expresses its philosophical point of view:
“The galaxy was too big a place for any being to stand naked and alone.”
