The United States
After Son takes it on the lam following suspicion that he murdered his wife, his self-exilic existence gives him a new perspective of his homeland. He comes to view America as:
“…sticky. Loud, red and sticky. Its fields spongy, its pavements slick with the blood of all the best people.”
The Clouds
Much of the opening section of the novel is expressed through personification. The author gives inhuman objects a kind of sentience through metaphor that mingles the literal possibilities with the mythic improbabilities:
“The clouds gathered together, stood still and watched the river scuttle around the forest floor…the clouds looked at each other, then broke apart in confusion.”
The Fog
A metaphor is introduced early on that seems to be just part of the general figurative tapestry leading to it. The emphasis is on another example of personification, the fog. But it is a specific part of the fog that turns out to have resonance:
“Fog came to that place in wisps sometimes, like the hair of maiden aunts. Hair so thin and pale it went unnoticed until masses of it gathered around the house and threw back one's own reflection from the windows.”
The Maiden Aunts and Their Hair
Over the course of the next ten pages or so, there are numerous literal mentions of maiden aunts and, often, a mention that also references their hair. The set-up in the metaphor about the fog reaches its culmination about fifteen pages later as a literal addition to a completely different metaphor:
“And when they saw those blue-if-it’s-a-boy blue eyes gone white fear, they fled, pulling their maiden hair behind them.”
Character Description
Morrison robustly turns to similes to aid in character description, but perhaps the single best example in the novel is one that implicates the emotional alienation from self-awareness which shapes the personality of Margaret. Even as she confesses to a shockingly sadistic act perpetrated upon her own young child, she uses language which prompts the observation that she confessing:
“like a laboratory assistant removing the spleen from a cute but comatose mouse.”
