Mother is bad with her head (Metaphor)
Emma, the mother of the ill boy and the wife of the carpenter, has mental issues. She hates everything and everybody around her, and she is absolutely fine with telling her husband and son that she hates them and wants them to leave. “for God’s sake come and take this child away before she drives me mad! My head’s splitting”, says she to her husband when he came back from work and Nil does everything she asks him to do because he doesn’t want to hurt her or to make her feel bad. Constant headaches drive this woman crazy and her children know it and try to avoid their mother. The metaphor expresses the state of Emma’s mental health as her elder son understands it.
I’m chained to a man who can’t say a word of truth (Metaphor)
Emma complains her husband that she hasn’t been sleeping for two days and children are driving her crazy, and there is no one to help her because no one understands her pain and sorrow. When Nil said that when he came in she was asleep Emma started screaming on him. She said he was a liar because she hasn’t been sleeping. “God help me! To have to lie night after night in the same bed with a liar!”. Her madness grew and it was hard to stop her from her constant preaching. Then, the metaphor represents Emma’s attitude to her husband, her irritation and unreasonable madness.
A hell of his childhood (Metaphor)
Emma’s attitude to her three children was even wore than her attitude to her husband. She hated that they were around, although they never talk to her and never bothered her because they knew that it would lead to scandal and terrible screams. It was hard for them to cope with that because they were little and they needed maternal love and care but they know they will never get it. One day a child went in to the room where her mother was just to have some water. Emma went crazy and told her husband to take the child away because the boy irritates her. The child went away “quaking with terror”. The metaphor represents the unbearable pain of children whose mother hates them.
Funny thoughts (Metaphor)
Nil, the eldest child of the family, was sick. He doesn’t worry about his sickness, although he feels really terrible. The only thing he cares about is that he grows older and he is terrified with that. “I used to think that I’d been a child once before, and grew up to be a man, and grew old and died”. He doesn’t realize that the adult life can bring joy and happiness because the adult people around – his parents are not happy. His mother hates everyone and everything and his father can do nothing with that. And they both just suffer. The metaphor reflects boy’s attitude to his life and his future.
Footsteps which sounded like one passing steadily to and fro, sorting out the past (Simile)
At New Year’s Eve, a man came back home from work. His footsteps sounded loudly in the silence of the hot night. The narrator pays attention to this sound: these were not the crunching footsteps of the English laborer – concludes he. These sounded more like steps of someone passing steadily to and fro as if this someone was thinking over and sorting out his past. The simile shows how much can be said and concluded about a person even without looking and him or her – just listening to the pace and sound of his or her footsteps.
