Childhood
The author engages a beautifully constructed simile to create a metaphor for how childhood memories are often filled with images mixing misery and joy:
“I don’t want it to be thought that dad was always brutal or that mother was always weeping. Through all these images there is a scatter of improbable brightness, like raindrops falling through sunshine.”
Uninhibited
The author describes how differently he and his brother Jack approached the business of making the transition from sheltered schoolkid to young adult. Whereas he was inhibited by a growth spurt, a skeletal physique and bad skin:
“Jack, untroubled by any such inhibitions, spent almost every night prowling the city like a tomcat."
Between the Wars
Equipped with the knowledge of what is to come, it can be difficult for modern readers to get a real sense of what life was between World War I and World War II. What seems inevitable now must have seemed the least likely possibility in the world then: would could really have imagined a second global conflict lay in wait just a few decades away? The author provides a metaphor that offers insight into the mindset:
“The world was so sure of itself then.”
The Great Depression
One of the most extended and poetically constructed similes in the entire text works to implicate the arrival of the Great Depression as a natural force of nature, thus working as an example of irony as well:
“It was like a great river flooding or changing its course, the way the Depression came—the insidious creeping movement of dark, strong, unpredictable forces, the flow of hidden currents, a clod falling and dissolving, the slide of earth, the cave-in of an entire bank, a sudden eddy swirling around a snag, tilting it over, sweeping it off into black oblivion.”
Hyperbole
The metaphorical image derived from the comparison of a simile can often gain additional power through either understatement or hyperbole. The following simile describes two characters who have been doing far more drinking than they should and so it is an example of hyperbole or overstatement:
“Jack and Sam looked like two survivors of a massacre.”
