The Sky as an Eye
The short story "Rotate" centers on the concept of how the day begins and ends. In particular, the metaphor of the eye lets Wallace use disturbing colors to make the day noticed, and he depicts both day and night in light of this metaphor. The short story only contains four sentences; each of these is a metaphor, all connected to the central concept of sky as eye.
Use of Concepts as Funnel
The short story "Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko" includes a brief digression on capital-C Creativity. David Foster Wallace uses a simile to compare this concept to a funnel, in that the absorbed material funnels down to what the artist ultimately creates. The spatial void of the funnel, as well as the natural way in which a funnel carries material downward, helps Wallace emphasize how creativity develops across generations.
Faces as Cards
At the beginning of the story "The Devil is a Busy Man," David Foster Wallace describes the faces of garage-sale patrons as cards in that they are kept hidden. The character wishes to give away things like couches for free, but the shoppers feel ill-at-ease about this; they fully show their trepidation at accepting something given for free without a reason for why it is being given away yet do not show to what extent they think about taking the thing as their own.
Women as Programmed
The short story "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" shows plenty of instances of grotesque misogyny. One relates the nature of female sexuality to the concept of programming. Instead of focusing on science to draw upon any valid difference between the sexes - even though this, in itself, would be disputable - the characters treat the long-range emotions they identify females as experiencing regarding sex as something which is programmed, not innate. The verbal presentation of this metaphor allows Wallace to draw a stark sense of how these characters mean their thought of women as beings who can be programmed for behavior and even belief.
Physical Charts for Attractiveness
Wallace draws the metaphor of physical charts as a way to mark attractiveness and other traits, particularly when exhibited by women. In doing so, he enhances the sense of the men in "Brief Interviews" as observers who speak of things they have not attained and have such distance from the women they hold as desirable that they see pleasurable traits from afar. The sense of this as a chart uses metaphor to show the image these men hold and how they perceive their own sexuality before drawing the gaze back to how alien this way of thinking is to the women or conventional relationships as shown in other literature.
