Memory
Protagonist Jack Reacher comes across as an older man interested in philosophy who creaks when he moves and has the skin of mahogany. His philosophy is mainly related to the processes of growing older, particularly the impact of recollection: “You got to imagine your memory is like an old bucket, you know? Once it's filled up with old stuff there ain't no way to get new stuff in.” The poetry of this metaphorical imagery is as creative as the logic is questionable. The image of memory as a bucket presupposes a limitation is the result of a failure to recall when the problem seems related less to storage capacity than storage retrieval.
Nazism
There is a strange—and too brief—interlude in the main action in which Reacher is called upon to deliver some justice to neo-Nazis. In fact, it almost seems as if the entire membership of Aryan Brotherhood has been engaged as assassins hired to pull off a hit on Reacher. His disgust at the circumstances of the event reaches beyond the literal to embrace the metaphorical: “I felt like I'd chased two roaches around that bathroom and stomped on them. But at least a roach is a rational, reasonable, evolved sort of a creature. Those Aryans in that bathroom had been worse than vermin.” This is an especially effective use of metaphor as there is a near-universal repulsion toward both reaches and rats that perfectly mirrors the way most people—though not nearly enough—feel toward fascists. The additional introduction of ironic humor in placing a higher capacity for critical thinking within the roach than the Aryans is also an efficient way of using imagery to reveal the setting of Reacher’s moral compass.
Under Pressure
Reacher is having a flashback. In that flash of a memory, his mind recalls a determined woman on a jetway who is managing to smile even under the pressure of the anxiety that comes with carrying a briefcase full of files which she risked everything to copy for him. That particular image stimulates a sort of stream-of-consciousness jumble of recollections that coalesce into a philosophical contemplation about the consequences of pressure on the human psyche. “The other thing I remember from the chemistry lab is stuff about pressure. Pressure turns coal into diamonds. Pressure does things…I had to decide how to use that pressure. I had to decide whether it was going to crush me or turn me into a diamond.” The artistry of this passage is a complex metaphor.
