Innocence
Childish innocence can be traced through the use of simile the author uses to show his compassionate and sympathetic attitude towards children: “children were sleeping, looking as rosy as cherubs”. The author’s good relation to the world of childhood is supported by the image of two boys sleeping: “two children were sleeping side by side, with their heads on the same pillow. Claude, aged eight years, was breathing quietly, with his little hands thrown outside the coverlet; while Etienne, only four years old, was smiling, with one arm round his brother's neck”.
Lantier’s temperament
Lantier’s character is introduced into the novel with the help of metaphors, which show how easily the man can turn from emotion to emotion When Gervaise speaks of the girl Adele, the one she saw Lantier with, the man’s “eyes had become as black as ink in his pale face. With this little man, rage blew like a tempest”.
Dreadful future
After Lantier left, Gervaise was thrown all alone into a world of unpredictable events. The vagueness and uncertainty of tomorrow are metaphorically represented by the place Gervaise lived with her boys. Paris was not a city of mercy; it was a devouring machine that crashed the lives of people, especially of poor people. Gervaise was one of these, and her fate was squeezed within its streets. “At this hour immense heat was rising from the pavement and from all the furnaces in the factories, setting alight a reflecting oven over the city and beyond the octroi wall. Out upon this very pavement, into this furnace blast, she had been tossed, alone with her little ones. As she glanced up and down the boulevard, she was seized with a dull dread that her life would be fixed there forever, between a slaughter-house and a hospital.”
