"The Pupil"
The sentences of Henry James are complex constructions. Not that they are difficult to understand, but that the ideas, information and concepts are presented with a mastery of the language fully on display to reveal the depth of the metaphor is intended to reveal.
“During the first weeks of their acquaintance Morgan had been as puzzling as a page in an unknown language—altogether different from the obvious little Anglo-Saxons who had misrepresented childhood to Pemberton. Indeed the whole mystic volume in which the boy had been amateurishly bound demanded some practice in translation.”
"The Jolly Corner"
This story is about a man returning to his home in New York after traveling the world for more than three decades. A full sense of the impact of that absence as well as a hint of the places he might have been and the things he may have seen:
“He closed the door and, while he re-pocketed his key, looking up and down, they took in the comparatively harsh actuality of the Avenue, which reminded him of the assault of the outer light of the Desert on the traveller emerging from an Egyptian tomb.”
"In the Cage"
In this very long story, James examines the fundamental proposition of identity. Is a person’s identity what other people see on the outside through action and expression? Or is that definition as facile as claiming identity is merely their name? His heroine remains unnamed throughout and what she shows is far different from what she thinks. Her imagination sustains her through her dreary existence:
“She was so absurdly constructed that these were literally the moments that made up—made up for the long stiffness of sitting there in the stocks, made up for the cunning hostility of Mr. Buckton and the importunate sympathy of the counter-clerk, made up for the daily deadly flourishy letter from Mr. Mudge, made up even for the most haunting of her worries, the rage at moments of not knowing how her mother did `get it.’”
"The Beast in the Jungle"
The title of this story is explained—to a point—as metaphor through an extended metaphor that is sustained throughout.
“Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years, like a crouching Beast in the Jungle.”
"Greville Fane"
Neary every author who has ever published a work of fiction uses the simile as a shortcut to character description at least partially to be economical. In other words, a comparison to a known entity is a quick way to describe an unknown entity. For James, however, even when he goes to the simile, the language remains just as robust. Sometimes to the point that it requires a second reading to figure out what the character is being compared to:
“She stood there under the lamp with her eyes on me; she was very tall, very stiff, very cold, and always looked as if these things, and some others beside, in her dress, her manner and even her name, were an implication that she was very admirable.”
