Setting
Metaphorical imagery can be a really effective way to introduce setting to a story. The story from which this example was taken opens with the observation by the narrator that he and others were waiting for night to arrive. The rest of the opening paragraph creates the moon which leads to the robust portrait created through metaphor in the opening line of the next paragraph:
“A dark, gusty wind, heavy with the smells of the thawing, sour earth, tossed the clouds about and cut through your body like a blade of lice.”
“The nature of youth”
The narrator asks the reader to consider the world in which Europeans lived during the dark days of fascism and world war. A world in which for the first time it would be difficult to locate a young man who had never killed anyone or who does not wish to kill someone. Despite all that, we collective still thrive upon the nature of youth which is the eternal longing for a world of peace that is free from such primitive human instincts as the desire to kill another.
The Americans
In the wake of the post-war recovery, the American peacekeeping troops arrive to put in place the plans for European recovery. And, unofficially, to indoctrinate the victims of oppressive fascism in the perfect world of American free enterprise democratic capitalism:
“These boys had come like crusaders to conquer and convert the European continent, after they had finally settled in occupation zones, they proceeded with dead seriousness to…instill in them the principles of profit-making by exchanging cigarette, chewing gum, contraceptives and chocolate bars for cameras, gold teeth, watches and women.”
“the mound of meat”
Metaphors are liberally used throughout by the Nazi soldiers to dehumanize the concentration camp prisoners. The urge—the compulsion—to take away every last vestige of humanity from their victims does not even stop with death. The narrator describes a sickening scene of trying to lift the dead weight of an obese victim and the narrator reveals the success of this ideological campaign through his own unwitting complicity in the use of the degrading metaphor with which he refers to this victim of madness.
Closing Line
The book ends on a metaphorical. The last line of the last story draws the narrative to a close on an image of literature as a hope for a future which can avoid the abominable atrocities of the past, for the narrator intends
“to write a great, immortal epic, worthy of this unchanging, difficult world chiseled out of stone.”
