The wall (mataphor)
The narrator’s position in life is very questionable - he insisted on the silence between him and his wife. And by his attempts he has built up the wall between himself and his wife, and this wall stays unbreakable. But the theory of the narrator fails: The Gentle remains uncontrollable, her rebellion is replaced by silence, and silence is a suicide. The lack of dialogue is the cause of the catastrophe, but he came to the understanding of this too late.
Chattering of innocence (Metaphor)
The narrator visits his future wife very often before the wedding and “when I went to see her in the evening, she told me in her chatter (the enchanting chatter of innocence) all about her childhood and girlhood, her old home, her father and mother.” Her behavior, a need for conversations and desire to share shows that she is a open-hearted person, with clear soul and great yearn for life. But the narrator has killed all her attempts of intimacy by his theory of “silence.”
Gentle turns into an animal (Simile)
There came time when the narrator’s wife started disobey, not that she did not do what her husband wanted or required, she became rebellious as his frames became too tight for her, the narrator describes the situation: “she suddenly leapt up, suddenly began shaking all over and — what do you think — she suddenly stamped her foot at me; it was a wild animal, it was a frenzy, it was the frenzy of a wild animal. I was petrified with astonishment; I had never expected such an outburst.”
The fallen veil (metaphor)
Through the entire story the narrator draws the reader’s attention to the fact that he understood something but it was too late, and only at the very end he clears up what was the moment and what was it that he understood. It happens accidentally when he hears his wife singing; he has never heard it before so the very idea of her singing astonished him. He asked the servant girl whether she sang often and she answered that mostly when he is not at home. And at this very moment some kind of enlightenment happened to him – “the truth shone out like the sun, and to doubt was impossible”. And this truth was that she did not care for him, so many years he pleased himself with a thought that she loved him, but she did not, and her obedience was not her own choice – it was his frames and his ideas of the world that made her so “gentle” – but is fact she never was this and proves it when jumps from the window and commits a suicide.
