Something Big?
The next to the last paragraph of the prologue situates through metaphor what the story told in this novel is all about. “Clare doesn’t say anything; she wants desperately to believe him, but standing here on the edge of something so big, it seems impossible.” The metaphorical edge of this symbolically big something is that she and her boyfriend have just twelve hours before they head off to college and therefore must decide whether to stay together or break up.
Chapter 11
It is a good thing that Clare likes to think in metaphorical terms. This is a quirk of personality that makes it easier to understand the psychology involved in this 12-hour melodrama. By Chapter 11 of the book, Clare is giving some serious thought to parental advice in trying to arrive at a rational decision regarding romance. “She thinks, for a moment, about all the things her parents have been telling her this summer. How college is the first chapter of the rest of your life.” What can be gleaned from this use of metaphor first and foremost is that Clare’s parents clearly are not creative writers. The figurative comparison of starting something new in life to turning the page to begin a new chapter in a book is not exactly a new idea. The lack of originality does not make it any less useful as advice to offspring, though.
The L-L-L-Word
In this teen romance, it turns out that the one who has trouble saying “I love you” is not the boy, but the girl. For a less robust change of pace, Clare tries to rely on the oldest trick in this game by explaining how she does not have to actually say the words since Aidan knows how she feels. This reluctance comes to Clare ironically and is explained metaphorically. “All her life, Clare has watched her parents pass the word back and forth as if it weren’t a fragile object, as if it were the sturdiest thing in the world.” Her parents both habitually triple the intensity with every spoken reminder to each other of how they really feel by saying “I love love love you.” For some reason, this demonstration of her actual inability to say the phrase because she is afraid something so sturdy will break has not been interpreted yet to mean what it clearly is shouting to Aidan: she is not a girl in love.
Darkness
Read any novel and the chances are overwhelming that darkness will be used metaphorically at some point. So relentless has it become that it routinely shows up even in teenage romances: “She walks up to the edge of the surf, straining her eyes against the darkness, which is so thick it feels like some sort of curtain has been pulled across the line between the land and the water, with only the moon left to peek through.” While the metaphor is very often engaged as commentary on the deviance of human psychology, it retains a link to the literal. The scene actually does take place at night, but the image of pulling a curtain to blot out the light makes the metaphor a commentary on loneliness and isolation.
Rubberband Girl
The story comes to an end with the image of Clare and a garishly green bowling ball. Into one of the finger holes has been stuffed a roll of paper. “Just seeing it there is enough to rattle her, to make her rubber-band heart snap back into place again, the twang of it jangling straight down through her toes.” In comparison to the lackadaisical effort to create poetic metaphor out of going away to college, this description of the uncertain qualities of the human heart aspires to high levels of lyricism with its metaphorical commentary on the elasticity of emotions.
