The Ghost
An interesting use of the metaphorical imagery of ghosts crops up in one of the most unlikely of places: a rumination on the effects of youthful indiscretions and the consequences of them upon the decision to marry:
“when a man married, he was to consider certain extravagances common to all bachelors as at an end. He had `had his fling, like all young men;’ perhaps he had been foolish like most young men, but no reproachful ghost of past misdeeds haunted him.”
And The Darkness
Darkness is a metaphorical tool that pretty much no author writing since the turn of the 20th century has completely avoided. The author proves that this favoritism is not limited just to those writing since the early 1900’s. As far back as 1874, Marcus Clarke was engaging it. And with a particularly artful and appropriate sense of conveying prison life:
“In the prison of the ’tween decks reigned a darkness pregnant with murmurs.”
The Doors
For the imprisoned man, nothing looms so large and bursts through the subconscious with such metaphorical intensity as the idea of freedom:
“he pulled from out his breast a little packet, and felt it lovingly with his coarse, toil-worn fingers, reverently raising it to his lips, and dreaming over it, with a smile on his face, as though it were a sacred talisman that should open to him the doors of freedom.”
The Stones
After a brief escape, the prisoner is captured and “condemned to the solitude of the Grummet Rock.” Such solitary endeavor can often result in the literal becoming metaphorical and vice versa. Reality and perception collide and instead of breaking apart, fuse together:
“He held converse with imaginary beings. He enacted the scene with his mother over again. He harangued the rocks, and called upon the stones about him to witness his innocence and his sacrifice.”
The Beetles
Where one might expect a comparison to sightlessness of a bat, one of the characters instead references a completely different sort of creature as a simile. While this synonymous phrase apparently has a history of use, the metaphor which ends the sentence appears to be far more obscure with only a few documented usages appearing in print either before or after publication of this novel. For those who might be confused, it is metaphor for dealing with improper displays of emotion:
“I’d rather have old Mr. Bowes, papa, though he is as blind as a beetle, and makes you so angry by bottling up his trumps as you call it.”
