Energy Conservation
Mrs. Burridge is suffering paranoid delusions about some imprecise upcoming apocalypse, and it is taking over her life. “She can’t believe in a distant future that is orderly like the past, she no longer seems to have the energy; it’s as if she is saving it up for when she will have to use it.” Like most compulsive obsessions, anticipatory anxiety can become all-consuming. The simile here suggests her previously successful ability to compartmentalize her life has begun to deteriorate as a result of putting too much energy into her delusions. The rest of the narrative confirms this to be true.
Pickle Orgy
The story opens with the annual tradition of Mrs. Burridge storing the jars of green tomato picks and her husband complaining that she makes so makes so much most is certain to go to waste. Mrs. Burridge knows that they won’t go to waste because her husband will consume the lion’s share. When she alludes to this fact by teasing him about the weight he keeps putting on, he replies “`You need a little fun in life,’ as though his pickles and cheese are slightly disreputable, almost like an orgy.” The comparison of eating pickles and cheese sandwiches to an orgy is intentionally hyperbolic. At the very same, the description of an orgy becomes ironic understatement due to the formality of the word choice.
Mrs. Burridge’s Prison
That Mrs. Burridge’s anticipatory anxiety is irrational seems to be confirmed through one particular simile. “She feels beleaguered, isolated, like someone shut up inside a fortress, though no one has bothered them.” Not only has no one actually tried to lay siege to her home, nobody has even simply walked past her home for days. This reality does absolutely nothing to lessen the paranoia which has stimulated her feelings of isolation and the sense of imprisonment.
Sending Signals
Mrs. Burridge’s delusional fears about a coming apocalypse inspires a series of irrational scenarios existing entirely in her mind. She imagines hordes of survivors of what disaster eventually ensues. To them, “her house is a beacon, signaling warmth and food. It will be fought over, but not by her.” She has gone so deeply down into the rabbit hole of her invented worries that she even somehow manages to transform her modest—and notably isolated—home into a lighthouse promising a full pantry, electrical power, and am supply of gas to fuel the furnace. Little wonder that she also has no expectations of surviving once the horde arrives.
Nothing Exploded
One of the effective ways the author conveys that Mrs. Burridge’s problems exist entirely in her mind is through subtle manipulation of language. For instance, “The smoke is thick and black, oily, as though something has exploded.” Thick, black, oily smoke rising in the sky where we know she has earlier had a vision it would be impacts the reader as well. The dream has primed both Mrs. Burridge and the reader to make a connection even where no connection actually exists. The use of simile is key here because the explosion exists only as a point of comparison. It is not even merely suggested that an explosion actually occurred. Nevertheless, the idea is successfully planted that an explosion might possibly be the origin of the smoke.
