The Broken Promise of Slumber
Sleep is taken for granted until it is out of reach. The first-person narrator of this novel understands this and there is something in her level of address which right from start seems on the precipice of hysterical paranoia which leads one to suspect that much of the world’s anxiety could be tempered if only slumber kept its incipient promise to more of the population:
“I only knew that I couldn’t sleep—that it was dangling like an unkept promise just inches away from me. I felt like I was running towards a mirage that kept receding, slipping away faster and faster the more desperately I ran.”
Paranoia Plus Confinement Plus Isolation
Take a woman who seems to be suffering from some higher than normal level of paranoia and consider where in all the world would be the place least likely to soothe those fearful sensations. The cramped and confined spaces on a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean, right? The narrator needs more friends like us:
“Its size, along with the perfection of its paint-work, gave it a curiously toylike quality, and as I stepped onto the narrow steel gangway I had a sudden disorienting image of the Aurora as a ship imprisoned in a bottle—tiny, perfect, isolated, and unreal—and of myself, shrinking down to match it with every step I took towards the boat.”
The Kicker
The straw that stirs the drink, if you will, is that the narrator isn’t merely suffering from paranoia like any normal person in this day and age and she’s not just having a little trouble getting into the blissful REM stage of sleeping. This woman is suffering from the real deal: sleep deprivation.
“I dozed off for about thirty painful minutes in the car from the station to the port, and when the car driver’s cheerful announcement broke into my sleep it was like a splash of cold water to the face.”
The Darkness
The Darkness isn’t just a band with a really weird video for a pretty great song. It is quite possibly the single most omnipresent metaphor in fiction since the end of the Victorian Era. Pick a novel—and these days it doesn’t even have to be limited to fiction—and chances are somewhere its pages there is a metaphorical or simile or—as in here—merely an unshaped abstraction of something grander than the mere lack of light which elevates darkness to a higher philosophical plane. Acknowledgement of that universal overuse admitted, there are occasions even now when a writer discovers a new way to extract something very elegantly constructed from imagery all too often presented much more tritely:
“I thought of the fathoms and fathoms of swirling blackness beneath us, of the darkness and silence below, and how something—someone—might fall for days through those black depths, to rest at last on a lightless seabed.”
Water Water Everywhere
The narrator is in a heightened emotional state intensified by paranoia and sleep deprivation. So, of course, as mentioned, she makes the least logical choice possible of going on a cruise. Think this might present an opportunity for metaphors related to water imagery? Just nod and say yes, the metaphors range from the almost lazy to the almost genius:
“Sleep crashed over me, claiming me like a wave.”
“[The lights] came on, flooding the little room with an unforgiving glare, and I stared at myself in the mirror—bone white, with wet hair plastered to my skull like the girl from The Ring.”
