Metaphor as a Pathway to Perception
Perception as a necessary element of similes is demonstrated by the way that a culture not the victim of the attacks of September 11, 2001 might see the exact same recording of events. What is a tragedy of unimaginable proportions to hundreds of millions can be something else entirely through the power of metaphorical comparison:
“It was like a video game where you had to swerve the plane away at the last minute, and the kid playing the game got distracted and went to the park to play, but the game.”
Setting
Metaphorical imagery can be especially effective for the purpose of creating setting. Through the direct comparisons of similes and the more poetic abstractions of the direct metaphor, just a few simple lines can convey ideas much more efficiently than relying simply on literal description. Metaphor not only illustrates that literal component, but adds a deeper component capable of expanding the reader’s ability to visualize that literal:
“That October, the wet season was unforgiving. The rains fell like the ocean would, if the entire seabed were yanked from underneath.”
Character Description: Physical
Similes and metaphors are perhaps most effective in the short term as a very efficient way to describe the physical features of a character. Human beings really differ from each other only to a point and getting to that point is surprisingly short to everyone but writers. Thus, the use of metaphor to convey information that would be extraordinarily dull if limited to literal descriptive terms:
“I noticed a woman, standing on the foot- path, gawking. She was the color of roasted coffee beans, a shade darker than me”
Character Description: Abstraction
Describing the slightest of variations in skin color using metaphor is one way to provide information about a character. But physicality is not everything. The life of a person is more than how they look or even how they act; it is also the more abstract components of life such as, for instance, the inevitability of death and how it came:
“Cold got Gram Izzy…Cold got her. Like she was hunted down. Like the cold was some kind-a assassin creepin’ icy an cruel through gaps in the elm an hickory, dodgin’ through the sweet gum trunks till it hit the Mississippi Delta.”
Poetry
Prose is expected to maintain a certain level of realism which does not constrict poetry. Verse can go off on wild explorations of fancy and whimsy that is simply not extended to certain works of prose. Especially those grounded in the realities of the political and social construction of society which makes life so difficult for so many. But even writers of the grittiest and most realistic novels have the soul of a poet within and for those who wish to find it, look no further than the use of metaphorical imagery:
“The lawyer woman looked sad when she heard Chaminda’s name, the cloud moving across her face like the promise of rain.”
