The carnival of the community
In the first pages of the novel, the people arriving for the auction of Lester’s house are compared to “a caravan of carnival folk.” This metaphor serves to alienate Lester from the community, by depicting them as a staged procession. They are not people that he identifies with, but ones who he views as inferior and false. They are stuck in the lives and roles that are expected of them, putting on a morbid show for the outsider Lester. It frames Lester as the observer to the performance that is the community, a theme which continues throughout the book as Lester stalks and watches community members from a distance before attacking them.
Metaphor of the hunting dogs
On pages 23-24 of Part I, Lester is attacked by a pack of hunting dogs in his cabin, but manages to fend them off. The dogs are described as “ghostly,” and giving “tortured wails and yelps nigh unto agony,” which likens them to omens of death. Later, on pages 68-69 of Part I, the same dogs are shown to successfully take down a boar in a beautifully gruesome fight. This comes only fifteen pages before Lester finds his first victim, and it is a metaphor for his evil desires successfully overcoming him. In the first fight, though an outsider Lester had not yet stooped to truly terrible acts, but the second fight was the metaphorical marker for Lester’s irreversible descent into himself.
Emerging from the cave and birth
When Lester finally emerges from the cave after three days of being lost it heralds in a new life for him. One he comes out of the darkness in the cave, he comes across a church bus and sees himself in a young boy before returning to the hospital where he was first locked up. “I’m supposed to be here” he says. This new version of Lester finally has found his place in the world, no longer commits any heinous acts, and eventually dies from natural causes. Emerging from the cave, and the trials of being lost there for three days in the darkness before that, mark a drastic reforming of Lester’s character. The imagery used to describe this process completes the metaphor of his rebirth.
The cave and death
The simile “his light scudded across a growth of limestone columns and what looked like huge stone urns moist and ill shapen” (124) compares rock features in the cave to urns. This contributes to the morbid imagery of the cave. Calling the rocks urns also directly refers to the fact that corpses are being kept in the cave, so in a way it in its entirety is an urn. The walls of the cave are also described as having “wet and bloodied mud…like the innards of some great beast” (125). This simile contributes to the comparison between the cave’s features and death and decay.
Stones and ancient monuments
In another passage, a simile once again is used to create mood from the rocky scenery. “Going up a track of a road through the quarry woods where all about lay enormous blocks and tablets of stone weathered gray and grown with deep green moss, toppled monoliths among the trees and vines like traces of an older race of man.” (25) This simile compares stones to monuments from an ancient culture, contributing to the nostalgic and bleak tone of the passage.
