Communicating with Metaphors, page 3

What is a Metaphor?, continued

So far, I’ve accumulated a few characteristics of the successful use of metaphor. The metaphor should:

• Be meaningful

• Enrich the reader’s experience

• Be somewhat original, or at least not a cliche

Here’s a passage from E. B. White’s The Trumpet of the Swan, which is about a swan named Louis who learns to play the trumpet:

But then he [Louis] discovered that, by holding his tongue in a certain way, he could get the trumpet to emit a small gasping sound. It wasn’t a very pretty noise, but at least it was a noise. It sounded a little like hot air escaping from a radiator.

The last sentence in this paragraph is a simile. A simile is a metaphor that uses the words “like” or “as”, thus rendering the comparison implied by the metaphor literal.

Once more I bring up the point that if your readers don’t understand the object used for metaphoric comparison, the metaphor loses its effectiveness.

Many contemporary readers of The Trumpet of the Swan, a wonderful story about a swan named Louis who cannot speak and therefore learns to play the trumpet, have probably neither seen nor heard a steam radiator. Saying that something sounds “like hot air escaping from a radiator” does little to convey to these readers the noise that Louis the swan was making as he tried to play his trumpet.

My six year old son pointed out to me as I was reading The Trumpet of the Swan aloud to him that he could decode the metaphor backwards. Since he had a good idea of what Louis’s awkward attempts to play the trumpet sounded like, he also thought he know what a leaky hot air radiator sounds like. But this was not what the author wanted to convey; his use of the simile was to give the reader a better feeling for the first sounds Louis made on his trumpet.

Continued next page

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