Dana's Journey through Time (Metaphor)
Many scholars see Dana's journey into the past as a metaphor for the Middle Passage, in which slaves were taken from Africa to their new "home" in America.
Dana and Kevin's Relationship (Metaphor)
Critic Angelyn Mitchell writes that Dana and Kevin's "interracial relationship can be read as a metaphor for how America may be healed" from tortured racial relations.
The Children's Slavery Game (Metaphor)
The children's game of "auction" and "slavery" is quite clearly a metaphor for slavery itself. The innocence of children is often used in literature to distill fraught concepts and expose their essence.
Information about Other Atrocities (Metaphor)
Dana listens to the news about South Africa's apartheid and reads a book about Nazism and the Holocaust; these are metaphors for slavery in America, reinforcing the horrors of the way human beings have been treated due to race and ethnicity.
Dana's Dual Existence in Past and Present (Metaphor)
The time traveling that Dana does is also a metaphor for how we negotiate past and present, how the reader is drawn into a story and asked to move freely from one time to another and consider past and present in relation to each other.
