Simile: Parents
The narrator's parents are remote to her, ensconced in their cabin and in her memory: "I thought of them as living in some other time, going about their concerns closed safe behind a wall as translucent as Jell-O, mammoths frozen in a glacier" (5). She does not let them in on what is really going on in her life, and once they die, she has to undergo a mythical, psychological journey to retrieve them. Confronting her parents when they are dead breaks through that Jell-O mold, that glacier—she comes to understand them and to be real about the parts of herself she knows they would not like.
Simile: Cottages
The narrator's return to the place where she grew up is full of surprises, one of them being that civilization is encroaching more and more. Atwood describes this as "Summer cottages beginning to sprout here, they spread like measles, it must be the paved road" (26). The paved road, a symbol of modernity and connection, was only the beginning, and now the disease, as she characterizes it, is fully spreading.
Simile: Prose
The narrator finds the drawings her father did and concludes he must be mad, but then finds a letter indicating they are actually indigenous rock paintings: "The academic prose breathed reason; my hypothesis crumbled like sand" (103). This simile allows us to see quickly and completely her supposition that he is insane come to an end, and just how quickly she will need to find another way to explain what happened to him.
Simile: Dogs
As the narrator and her friends travel deeper into the wilderness, the signs of humans' presence are more and more disturbing and destructive. When they come across a heap of trash, the narrator muses, "It was like dogs pissing on a fence, as if the endlessness, anonymous water and unclaimed land, compelled them to leave their signature, stake their territory, and garbage was the only thing they had to do it with" (111). She equates the leaving of trash with a primal marking of territory, condemning the selfish and pointless gesture.
Simile: Death
After her abortion, the narrator felt that "I was emptied, amputated; I stank of salt and antiseptic, they had planted death in me like a seed" (145). The simile uses a seed to suggest how death was put into her empty womb and how it would grow inside her. The simile is effective but also disturbing and paradoxical—how can death be life?
