Character Description: External
Similes are the go-to choice of literary techniques the author uses to delineate character. This is a popular method since the natural comparative qualities of the simile become a kind of shorthand for conveying what a character looks like that makes it easy to picture them:
“Everybody fixes their eyes on Hewett. The professor is shaped like a diving bell – narrow shoulders tapering down to a wide waist, where his rumpled dress shirt is half untucked from his slacks. His frazzled grey hair and sad, watery eyes make him look like Albert Einstein after a night of running failed calculations.”
Character Description: Internal
The simile is clearly useful for describing what a character resembles on the outside. With a little more insight and precision of detail, the simile can accomplish the same goal for demonstrating what type of personality or mental state a character possesses:
“I get the feeling Luca is the type of guy who would cheerfully skip through a minefield and somehow come out unharmed on the other side, while Ophelia would tear her hair out and chide him for being careless.”
The Nautilus
The book is a kind of unofficial sequel to Jules Verne’s classic adventure tale 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Like a lot of people, the narrator instinctively misunderstands that title, assuming it to mean the famous submarine on which most of the story takes place actually dived to that very specific rounded-off depth. A metaphorical description of the vessel becomes a kicker at the end of the explanation of what the title really means:
“Instead, the book title meant he’d travelled a distance of 60,000 nautical miles underwater, which was still crazy by nineteenth-century standards. It meant he circled the world seven and a half times in that old rusty can, the Nautilus.”
Self-Insight
The thing about first-person narration is that it offers opportunities for metaphorical self-description. Especially if the narrator is one of those given to persistent self-reflective contemplation. Which is something this narrator is not. But still, when given the chance:
“Luca insists that we will not talk any further about the Nautilus until the morning. Even though I am burning with questions, I suppose that’s just as well. My head already feels like it is going to explode from too much impossibility.”
The Aronnax
The narrator and her friends attend is a school which is attacked by an unknown vessel capable of obliterating a square mile of territory without effort. It turns out to be an advanced submarine. Exactly what kind of advance submarines nobody seems to know at first; it is merely a thing of legend to begin with:
“The Aronnax is a submarine the way a Lamborghini is an economy car.”
