Sarcasm
The narrator recalls what a person once told him about the true nature of those who tend to be sardonic. “Sarcastic people tend to be marshmallows underneath the armor.” What the character named Miz Mimi is suggesting here through metaphor is that mocking others with ironic humor is a defense mechanism. It is an emotional suit of armor that is supposed to make a person look tough but is really hiding the fact that they are soft and weak like marshmallows.
Darkness
Over the course of the 20th century—especially following the revelations of the atrocity exhibition conducted by the Nazis during War World II—the single most omnipresent metaphor in modern literature became references to darkness. “I had to take in all this bogus history, this darkness, in a hurry.” The narrator emphasizes the metaphor with italics to describe the events of an alternative history of a century noteworthy for actual historical acts of horror, terror, and evil. That darkness is suitable as a metaphor for both historical events and fictional ones points out just how deeply embedded it has become as a concept to define the modern age.
Acting
The narrator had at one time been a high school drama teacher. “Directing teenage actors is like juggling jars of nitroglycerine: exhilarating and dangerous.” Nitroglycerine is a very unstable material that can suddenly explode like dynamite with little warning. This simile is intended to compare such a lack of stability and firm expectations with teenagers acting on a stage. Some are incredible during rehearsals and then develop crippling stage fright come the night of the actual performance while others are forgettable until the moment they appear in front of an audience.
Dance of Destiny
Any book about traveling backward in time with the possibility of altering the future is ultimately a story about the vagaries of fate and destiny. The narrator gets philosophical on this theme at one point, resorting almost to sheer metaphorical language. “The multiple choices and possibilities of daily life are the music we dance to.” This poetic imagery is intended to suggest that every life is a path that offers multiple choices leading to multiple consequences. Like dancing, the choices one makes are not necessarily guided by conscious choice, but rather as a response to external influences. One often doesn’t think about the possibilities afforded by the choice one makes any more than one consciously chooses the movements one makes in response to a song’s rhythm.
Derry
At one point the character warns the reader “You must always keep in mind that in Derry, reality is a thin skim of ice over a deep lake of dark water.” To anyone unfamiliar with the works of Stephen King, this is kind of an inside joke as the author sets many of his dark tales within a small fictional village in Maine. Just before this metaphorical description of the psychological state of Derry, the narrator has had a short conversation with a few kids who are major characters in King’s novel It. That story is notoriously about how the adults of the town willingly ignore and deny the reality of the recurrence every few decades of a child-eating entity often taking on the appearance of a clown.
