The simile of the school teacher
The author commences the story by comparing the spinster schoolteacher to an animal when he writes, “Even the spinster schoolteacher crawling like an animal from the sightseeing bus toward an Umbanda temple with no a priori beliefs, as they say." The simile helps the reader to relate the schoolteacher's walking to an animal.
The simile of Goofus birds
The narrator is comparing the people of her class to Goofus birds when saying, “And that we become like mythical Goofus birds, invented by lumbermen I think, who fly backward and build their nests upside down. We get smashed, and our endings are swift." The narrator's message to her people is that they should change their ways and do things uprightly. Otherwise, their end will be swift because they will be smashed.
The simile of a black frog
The typewriter is compared to a black frog when the narrator writes, “...and then that morning I saw you, in our berth, on the steamer, Lake Erie mumbling before it, the typewriter was sitting there and seemed to be crouched like a black frog with white clatter for teeth." The narrator reminds Raven that she was awake, and she witnessed what was taking place, including the typewriter's sitting posture.
The Simile of Camelot
The narrator compares Swille’s dancing to Camelot when saying, “Camelot became Swille's bible, and one could hear him in the tower, giggling elflike as he came to each new insight; and they heard him dancing as Camelot, a fairy tale to most, became for him and Anglican Grand Design.”
The Simile of Mumbo-Jumbo
The author compares Edgar Allan Poe's irrationality to mumbo-jumbo when asking, “Why isn't Edgar Allan Poe recognized as the principal biographer of that strange war? Fiction, you say? Where does fiction begin and leaf off? Why does the perfectly rational, in its own time, often sound like mumbo-jumbo?”
