The curse words (Simile)
Joanna’s father used to have ‘another woman’ who was a poet, and the mother knew about it. Joanna was six when her mother, brother and sister were murdered, but she clearly remembers how her mother used to curse the poet woman. These words “were like poison in the air” for the little Joanna.
Sweet memories of the childhood (simile)
Joanna remembered how she and her sister used “to hang upside down on the gate and their hair reached the ground like brooms sweeping the dust”.
Shelter (simile)
When Joanna ran into the field of the wheat to hide from the murderer, it “had closed around her like a golden blanket”. The simile figuratively is used to depict a place of protection.
Sacrifice (simile)
The scene of the murder avoids many details, as it is retold as the vision of a six-year-old girl. But the author adds sadness to it with the use of simile: “the blood had mingled and soaked into the dry earth, feeding the grain, like a sacrifice to the harvest”.
Vocabulary of violence (metaphor)
Pondering over his life, Jackson goes back in his memory to some scenes of his childhood. It was filled with different images of brutality, which almost had become casual. “Punches slaps, hair-tweaking, ear-pulling, Chinese burns’ – metaphorically speaking “a whole vocabulary of violence”.
Growing ‘bloodthirsty’ (metaphor)
Louise once had witnessed a dreadful car accident, and a drunk driver was to be blamed for the lives of four people driving in the other car. After this scene, she noticed that a legal punishment was not enough for her; she turned to be “more bloodthirsty”, and that was saying something.
