Topic > An analysis of metaphors and similes in "The God of Small Things"

'His reality is magical. He has a greater awareness of the natural world, of smells and sounds, of color and light. And he makes this world, at once strange and familiar, palpable in prose of sinuous beauty... A small marvel of style and compassion.' (Jason Cowley, The Times) Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay With her sharp imagery, logical thinking and emotional sensitivity, Arundhati Roy presents before us a world with which we can very easily identify. His lucid language, witty wordplay, and rapid, sudden changes of thought serve to put us more at ease rather than confuse us as Faulkner's work does. She is closer to Steinbeck in style than Morrison, with an added quality of overuse of similes and metaphors that help bring more beauty to her work. His "utterly outstanding masterpiece", The God of Small Things, justifies Rushdie's assertion that "literature is self-validating". Along with the brilliance of its interconnected themes and genuine tragic resonance, the novel appeals to our senses with its wonderful descriptions. Roy attempts to "show" rather than simply "tell" and does so, with great success. The use of similes and the connections it creates between tangible objects and imaginary feelings, between apparent realities and those buried in the unexplored corners of our mind, between objects we can visualize and those we can only see with the eye of our soul , make his writing very, very interesting. There is an abundance of similarities on every other page and it scares readers to imagine that with everything else he talks about, he can think of something else that simply and very interestingly connects to it. He describes situations, people and their feelings and none of his descriptions go without being compared to another natural object, feeling or action. Speaking about the lives of Estha and Rahel, he writes: Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits appeared as a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Small creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. Delicate crescents have gathered before their eyes, and they are the same age as Ammu was when she died. Thirty-one. Not old. Not young. But a vital age and capable of dying. (Roy 3)Very interesting, we move with the flow and imagine where she makes us imagine, all the things she herself visualizes. Feelings are described in the same fascinating way. After Sophie Mol's death, Mammachi is very saddened: "Her tears fell from behind her glasses (spectacles) and trembled along her jaw like raindrops on the edge of a roof" (Roy 5). Estha, standing next to Ammu, is "barely awake, his aching eyes glittering like glass." But during all this, Rahel's imagination flies elsewhere: "Rahel thought of someone who had taken the trouble to go up there with cans of paint, white for the clouds, blue for the sky, silver for the jets, and brushes and more thin He imagined Him up there, someone like Velutha, naked and shining, sitting on a plank, swinging from the scaffolding in the high dome of the church, painting silver casts in the blue sky of the church (Roy 6).” That's not all, she further imagines him "falling like a dark star from the sky he had created" with "dark blood pouring out of his skull like a secret." (Roy 6). It's all very visual and we can not only 'see' all the images, but see them as clearly as the writer or her characters do. Here lies the strength of the writer's description. Gifted with the power to create characters that stimulate our sensesas vividly as the people around us, Roy makes us meet each of them in person. We meet Estha who takes up “very little space in the world” due to the strange “silence” that has enveloped her being. We see him "sweeping, dabbing" and doing "all the laundry." We accompany him to the market square where he has never bargained. They never fooled him.' It appears to be a "silent bubble floating on a sea of ​​noise." The silence that overwhelms him is not an ordinary silence. It took over his entire being: “Once the stillness came, it remained and spread throughout Estha. It extended from his head and wrapped him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient fetal heartbeat. It sent its furtive tentacles and suckers creeping along the inside of his skull, hovering over the mounds and valleys of his memory, dislodging old sentences, plucking them from the tip of his tongue (Roy 12).” And furthermore we see that "he began to seem wiser than he really was." Like a fisherman in a city. With the secrets of the sea within it.' (Roy 13) His twin sister, Rahel, who "moved toward marriage" with Larry McCaslin, "like a passenger moves toward an occupied seat in an airport lounge," shares her twin brother's emptiness. This feeling of emptiness is just another form of “stillness in the other”. These are two things that fit together. Like stacked spoons. Like the familiar bodies of a lover. The description of these twins as babies is very interesting when we go back to the time when their teeth were growing. While Estha's teeth were "still uneven at the ends," Rahel's teeth were "waiting inside her gums, like words in a pen." They were all baffled that an age difference of eighteen minutes could cause such a discrepancy in the timing of the front teeth' (Roy 37). The similes and metaphors that Roy employs with great skill are at once tactile and surreal, like an overly vivid dream, and his storytelling style appears to be a fusion of the styles of Joseph Conrad, John Steinbeck, and Toni Morrison. His short, concise sentences cover such broad notions that readers, mesmerized by his ability to convey his ideas vividly, cannot help but admire his style. Of Chacko he writes: "He claimed to be writing a family biography that the family would have to pay him not to publish." (Roy 38) When the twins were born, Ammu "counted four eyes, four ears, two mouths, two noses, twenty fingers, and twenty perfect nails," but ironically, the twins' father, "lying on a hard bench in the hospital corridor, he was drunk." (Roy 41) Logically, with two children and “no more dreams,” Ammu returns to her parents after being mistreated by her husband and we justify the act. Roy brilliantly juxtaposes opposites through his comparisons. Further describing Ammu, he explains the inner workings of her brain as an "unmixable mix". The infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless anger of a suicide bomber.' Seen from the eyes of her twins, she sometimes seemed to be the "most beautiful" woman they had ever met. “And sometimes it wasn't.” (Roy 45). He surprises us with his sudden change in his last sentences and this works really well. Please note: this is just an example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay I believe Roy slowly reveals the layers of his mind and what he carries within himself for the readers. The tools he uses become stronger in his hands as he employs them with full strength and interest. His similes and metaphors become a little harsh and sweet at the same time. The language he uses becomes his aid and sweeps the minds of the readers).