Like a person
The narrator owns in the novel a bird which she is attached to. She admits she loves the little creature and cares for it as if it were a baby. To make the reader understand why she can feel such an attachment to a bird, she compares it with a human, someone capable of understanding her and even communicating with her to an extent.
Like Anne Frank
The narrator learned about Anne Frank during the war and became obsessed with her to the extent she started to imitate her literary style. The narrator did this in private and when the rest of the world started to compare her to Anne Frank, she panicked. The reason why the narrator was compared with Anne Frank is because there was a possibility the narrator will have the same fate as her. Thus, when the narrator is compared with Anne, it is transmitted the idea that her life was not safe and the possibility of dying was constant.
Like a swimmer
The narrator in the story did not understood why the war was taking place and why it had to happen. She felt in many ways trapped in a world that was behaving irrationally and not in its best interest. No matter what she did, she could not escape from it and in order to transmit this idea, she compares herself with a swimmer trapped by the ocean’s currents. This comparison is important because it transmits the idea that the narrator felt trapped and powerless.
The dead trees
An important element which appears in the novel is the trees which the narrator sees from her room. The trees are in a park where she used to go and play with her friends and so the trees remind her of the happiness she experienced before the war. As the battles continue to rage one, the trees die slowly one by one and the narrator can do nothing more but to watch them. The death of the trees happens at the same time when the narrator loses her hope about the future and so the trees are used here as a metaphor for her failing faith.
The diary
Towards the end of the book, the diary which the narrator has kept is taken by one of her teachers, with the narrator’s permission, and mailed to a publishing company. Soon, the diary is published and the narrator becomes famous for her writing even though she is a small child. The narrator continues to stay in her war-torn city while her book is read by countless of people. During this time, the narrator asks herself it the people who read her book think about her at all. The book becomes a metaphor for the way in which the rest of the world, or rather those who were not affected by it, experienced the war and the conflicts. They distanced themselves and read from books, without thinking about the authors and the real experiences the authors went through. For the readers, the experiences were just words on a page and so there was no sense of reality transmitted.
