Jane Eyre
Jane Eyre is the only book other than the Bible which the narrator’s ultra-religious mother considers worthy of reading. Unfortunately for the narrator, when her mother conveys Bronte’s famous story, Jane ends up going through with her intended marriage to St. John rather than staying with Rochester. The day finally arrives when the truth is learned:
“It was like the day I discovered my adoption papers while searching for a pack of playing cards. I have never since played cards, and I have never since read Jane Eyre.”
Knotted History
A major theme of the novel is the difficult of discovering the truth in history, as the Jane Eyre episode reveals. History is described metaphorically as being something knotted and intricate that is difficult to determine where the thing begins and where it all ends:
“The best you can do is admire the cat’s cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play.”
History is like a Sandwich
Yes, indeed, metaphors regarding history abound in plentiful volume in this novel. Since history is flexible and dependent upon perspective, getting it from the wrong source or through a compromised perspective results in a putrid rotten understanding of the past. Construction history is thus compared to constructing a sandwich:
“Here is some advice. If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own sandwiches….”
Curiosity
Like math to some, science to others and literature to the genuinely crazy among us, history is often an academic subject deemed by some students to be boring, unworthy of effort and, ultimately, useless in real life. The narrator and protagonist of the story might describe these people as simply lacking a developed sense of curiosity. The pursuit of history is all about curiosity, it is a form of exploration:
“Curious people who are explorers must bring back more than a memory or a story, they must bring home potatoes or tobacco or, best of all, gold. But happiness is not a potato.”
The Can’t and the Aardvaark
By now it should be rather obvious that metaphor is the dominant expressive mode of figurative language in the novel. It is not merely used to describe history and its surrounding concepts, however. One of the most eye-opening examples describes something a circumstance certainly related to history, but not inextricably linked together:
“Uncertainty to me was like Aardvaark to other people. A curious thing I had no notion of, but recognised through secondhand illustration.”
