Dog (Simile)
In Anna’s description of her time with her relatives—“He let them cousins of my Old Woman’s keep me on their farm and work me to death like a dog” (22)—the simile allows the reader to see just how terribly she was treated, how little she was valued, and how awful Chris’s abandonment of her truly was.
Hair (Simile)
Mat is enamoured of Anna, asking her when they meet, “Where else’d you get that fine yellow hair is like a golden crown on your head” (40). His comparison of her hair to a crown emphasizes her beauty and his attraction to her, but it is also ironic, as she is far from royalty due to her choice of profession.
Meek (Simile)
Mat promises that he’d be “...staying at home with [Anna] as meek as a lamb each night of the week I’d be in port” (44). He wants to marry her and show fidelity to their love and thus uses a simile of a lamb to suggest how docile he’d be. No more philandering, no more carousing.
Anchor (Metaphor)
Mat derisively tells Chris, who constantly rails against the sea, that “You’ve swallowed the anchor” (55), a metaphor used to convey his opinion that Chris has allowed the sea to pummel him and that he is not man enough to pick himself up again. The swallowing of the anchor suggests he has sunk very low below the surface and cannot bring himself up again.
House of Cards (Metaphor)
In the metaphor “Chris seems in a stupor of despair, his house of cards fallen about him” (66), O’Neill aptly portrays the despair felt by someone when the fictitious reality they’ve created in order to find happiness and peace comes apart. A house of cards is naturally precarious, as was Chris’s belief that all of his past behavior regarding Anna could somehow be ignored and they’d live happily ever after as father and daughter.
