Belated Tuesday Night Post

I was actually supposed to post on Tuesday night after class, but I guess better late than never.

The element that struck me the most in the first section was the obsessive use of simile. It seems that every visual image, every sound, and every movement is "like" something else. This constant comparing fades out as the children move on to boarding school - though it doesn't disappear completely.

Maybe I'm being influenced by reading Moby-Dick in another class right now, but I see these similes as a childlike attempt to understand/interpret the world. Of course, this plays into our class discussion on subjectivity because similes, really all interpretations, are not universal. Jinny may think one object is like another object; that doesn't mean that Bernard will agree. There is no objective, scientific measure to determine if, say, "my hand" really is similar to "a snakeskin" (15). 

This contrasts with the rarer use of metaphor. Rhoda, for example, says that "The black bars on the clock are green oases" (13). This is not a simile, but a metaphor, because the object is the other object, not akin to it. It sounds deceivingly objective; however, it's just subjectivity under the auspices of certainty.