Literary Terms in Context

Examples in context:

Salman Rushdie: No. Because, first of all, it's not supposed to be a despairing view of India today but of that generation. In the book, the children are a kind of metaphor for potential destroyed, or hope betrayed, or whatever. And I think that's kind of true about what has happened in India since 1947.    

Rushdie's work hinges on his many identities--an Indian Muslim who writes in English, whose family left India for Pakistan, and who now lives in England. Midnight's Children (1981), which first brought Rushdie a wide audience and won Britain's Booker Prize, is an allegory about the birth of independent India.   

The last chapter of the book gives the joyless and distressing picture of 'new' India after defeat of midnight children (one more image - "Abracadabra'). But the protagonist, ending his story, leaves one empty pickle jar - a symbol of hope: the children of the vanquished are alive, they differ from their parents but nevertheless they ARE their children.   

By using strong words like "I command," theatrical words like "the wings," and comical words like "Shazam," Rushdie creates a feeling of the absurd. He also employs, as he so often does in Shame, a metaphor such as, in this case, "she burned, she fried," and a simile like, "as if she could extrude consciousness through her eyelashes," to maintain the rapid transitions and breakneck trains of thought which characterize his and other postmodernist writers' work. The choice of words, as well as the arrangement of them, is crucial to Rushdie's style. 

Simile and Metaphor

Metaphor and simile are both used to compare things that are essentially unlike. In simile, the comparison is clearly expressed by some word or phrase, such as like, as, than, similar to, resembles or seems. In metaphor, the comparison is not clearly expressed. The figurative term is substituted for or identified with the literal term. In general, a simile refers only to a limited range of characteristics that the two things have in common. A metaphor may open up a whole range of symbolic or figurative meaning:

Literal Imagery: He is a glutton and extremely messy when eating.

Simile: He eats like a pig.  

Metaphor: He is a pig.  

The metaphor evokes many other images in your mind, above and beyond being a messy eater. For example, you could be saying he is "a male, chauvinist pig" or a "rude, obnoxious boar." And, of course, policeman have also been called "pigs" in a derogatory way.

Symbol

 Before a symbol can be defined it must be distinguished from a sign. An object that signifies something else, such as a red light which instructs the motorist to stop, is a sign. To be efficient, the sign must have only one meaning. A symbol, on the other hand, is more complex. In its simplest sense, it is also something that stands for something else. The cross, for example, is a symbol of Christianity, the hammer and sickle of Communism, John Bull of England, etc. Such symbols are more complicated than signs, however, for they sum up a large number of ideas and attitudes and can mean different things in different circumstances. The cross, standing for the whole complex of Christianity, is an object of reverence to some and of contempt to others. Nevertheless, such symbols are public and generally understood. 

These symbols are used in literature as in ordinary discourse, but in literature we often find, in addition, symbols of a different sort. Such symbols do not have a publicly accepted meaning but take their significance from the total context in which they appear. (Symbols may also be taken from a special area of knowledge, such as Freudian psychology, or from a private system of the author's; however, the most powerful symbols are usually formed—or, if borrowed, modified-by the works in which they are found.) Thus, the white whale of Melville's Moby Dick, one of the most discussed of literary symbols, is simply the animal which Captain Ahab pursues but at the same time much more.  

  Allegory