‘A little bit farther and I ought to be seeing Pluto’
The narrator in ‘The Wind-Up Bird and The Tuesday’s Woman’, compares himself to be an extra-terrestrial creature or formation who is flying out of the universe. For that formation, the target should have been to explore outside of the solar system, i.e., his comfort zone. So, he should have been somewhere near Pluto, almost getting out of his comfort zone. But, he says that he lost sight of who he wanted to be and got comfortable in his desk job to explore things around him.
‘The stone-chill silence of boulders frozen deep into a glacier fifty thousand years ago’
The narrator in ‘The Wind-Up Bird and The Tuesday’s Woman’ compares the silence of the phone to the silence of the eternal silence of the glaciers. He has just received a call from a woman who tried to seduce him on phone. He is not just shocked but excited as well. To him, the silence is pinched and more pronounced by the fact that he is hyper-alerted due to that phone call.
‘A few minutes later, the pangs struck with the force of the tornado in The Wizard of Oz’
The narrator in ‘The Second Bakery Attack’ compares the hunger he and his wife feels one night as destructive, forceful and harsh as the force of tornado depicted in the book, The Wizard of Oz.
'An expansion of consciousness.'
The narrator in ‘Sleep’ compares herself to an evolved creature who can survive without sleeping. After experiencing no sleep and yet, being fully conscious and experiencing no fatigue or restlessness, she begins to believe she is some evolved species of human beings, who can remain conscious for more time than anyone can, thus, she is an expansion of consciousness.
'The clock was a wedding gift, big and heavy—big and heavy as time itself'
The unnamed narrator in ‘The TV People’ compares the clock he received as a wedding gift to time, not just in terms of an instrument used to measure time, but as a physical entity that could be considered as resolute and accurate as the actual time itself.
