American Pastoral: Metaphors 6 key examples

Part 1 of the novel, "Paradise Remembered," details the intertwined childhoods of Nathan Zuckerman and the Swede. After the title itself points to something heavenly, the first words of the novel as a whole make it clear who the reigning deity of this paradise was: "The Swede." In the rest of Part 1, the metaphor of the Swede as a god is strengthened both indirectly through the narrator's diction and through explicit comparisons. The narrator frequently uses words like "idolize" and "worship" to describe his and the broader community's feelings about "our neighborhood talisman." 

Allusions to Greek mythology also play a role in developing the Swede's divinity. For example, when he begins to explain how the Swede wound up in such an exalted position, the narrator describes "the elevation of Swede Levov into the household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews." And when the narrator recalls running into the Swede as an adult, a friend who witnesses the interaction tells him "You should have seen your face—you might as well have told us he was Zeus. I saw just what you looked like as a boy."

Shortly after this, the narrator recounts a childhood memory to illustrate that the Swede was a Zeus figure for him when he was a boy: During a football scrimmage, the Swede addresses him and makes him feel as though "the god (himself all of sixteen) had carried me up into athletes' heaven. The adored had acknowledged the adoring." This is evidently a core memory of Nathan Zuckerman's childhood, and when he invokes it once more later in the narrative, he again describes it as being chosen by a god: "when for a moment it had seemed that I, too, had been called to great things and that nothing in the world could ever obstruct my way now that our god's benign countenance had shed its light on me alone."

Alongside the narrator's account of how the Swede became such a mythic figure in his childhood, he simultaneously examines the obliviousness and gaps often contained in such mythologizing. When he meets the Swede for dinner, Nathan Zuckerman finds himself "childishly expecting to be wowed by his godliness, only to be confronted by an utterly ordinary humanness." He realizes that there are downsides to being seen as a god by everyone around you: "One price you pay for being taken for a god is the unabated dreaminess of your acolytes." The desire to interrogate and complicate his idealized view of the Swede is why Nathan Zuckerman ultimately writes the book that becomes American Pastoral—he wants to know what it's like "to embrace your hero in his destruction."

In a conversation with Zuckerman at their high school reunion, Jerry acknowledges that his brother was "a very nice, simple, stoical guy" and that he in one way "could be conceived as completely banal and conventional."  After talking at length about the seeming banality of his brother's "ordinary decent life," he employs a metaphor to articulate that the Swede's existence was everything but benign.

But what he was trying to do was to survive, keeping his group intact. He was trying to get through with his platoon intact. It was a war for him, finally. [...] He got caught in a war he didn't start, and he fought to keep it all together, and he went down.

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While Jerry speaks these words, neither Zuckerman nor the reader knows about Merry and the Old Rimrock bombing. This missing context makes the war metaphor seem exaggerated. While Zuckerman and the reader still just see the Swede as the ordinary guy that Jerry initially described, this dramatic description of the Swede's desperation to "survive" and keep "his group intact" makes it clear that there's more behind the Swede's surface.

And sure enough, just after this, Jerry brings up "little Merry's darling bomb." This information adds a layer to the war metaphor. While the war Jerry initially describes his brother waging as purely figurative, Merry's bomb is no metaphor.

As Jerry elaborates on the difficulties that plagued the Swede's family life, these layers intertwine. For instance, when he says that the Swede's life "was blown up by that bomb" or that the bomb "detonated his life," he sustains the war metaphor all while discussing a literal bomb. Roth plays with the same effect at the very end of Part 1, when Zuckerman writes that "after turning their living room into a battlefield, after turning Morristown High into a battlefield, [Merry] went out one day and blew up the post office." Here, a figure of speech once again gives way to something literal—with real-life consequences. 

By intertwining figurative violence and on-the-ground violence, Roth illustrates the high-stakes atmosphere of the late 1960s, for with Merry's convictions, violent resistance to the Vietnam War was necessary for making Americans understand what they were implicated in on the other side of the world. On one of the last pages of the novel, Roth again uses the word "war" in multiple ways to convey the many layers of conflict and struggle depicted in the novel: "It was not the specific war that she'd had in mind, but it was a war, nonetheless, that she brought home to America—home into her very own house."

Toward the end of Chapter 4, the narrator describes the Swede's fixation on a bomb blast which takes place in Greenwich Village two years after Merry's disappearance. To begin with, the Swede is convinced that the two young women who were seen stumbling out of the building are Merry and Rita. Even when he accepts that this is unlikely, he remains fixated on the women.

Reading about the women's parents in the newspaper, he relates to the "uncommunicativeness" of one of the fathers and knows how much "emotional anguish" lies beneath it. Roth uses a metaphor to capture the Swede's emotions and the emotions he imagines the parents to be dealing with: "he knows the truth is that the missing girl's parents are drowning exactly as he is, drowning day and night in inadequate explanations." In this metaphor, the Swede's distress becomes a physical sensation. Inundated with information that doesn't lead anywhere, he he feels as though he's drowning.

Later in the same chapter, another figurative image likens the Swede's experience of being overwhelmed to being submerged in water. As the narrator continues to describe the Swede's coping strategies after Merry's disappearance, his obsession with the news gives way to an obsession with Angela Davis. Because he thinks he remembers finding something written by Davis in Merry's room shortly before the bombing, he believes "that Angela Davis can get him to his daughter."

Yes, now he remembers clearly sitting at Merry's desk trying to read Angela Davis himself, working at it, wondering how his child did it, thinking, Reading this stuff is like deep-sea diving. It's like being in an Aqua-Lung with the window right up against your face and the air in your mouth and no place to go, no place to move, no place to put a crowbar and escape.

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In this passage, a simile captures the Swede's experience trying to read a text by Angela Davis. By comparing this experience to deep-sea diving in an Aqua-Lung, Roth illustrates how stifling and intense the Swede finds Davis's prose. While many people find the urgency and energy of her writing engaging to the point of liberating, the Swede finds it claustrophobic.

The metaphor and the simile capture relatively different experiences and emotions, yet it's worth noting that they both compare something the Swede is unable to handle with being underwater. By making his anguish physical, Roth offers a more vivid picture of the Swede's helplessness in the years after Merry's disappearance. At the end of the novel, he again employs a sinking metaphor to evoke the Swede's desperation during the dinner party—when he finds himself "all evening long being unmade by steadily sinking under the weight."

After noting that Angela Davis's writing reminds the Swede of "reading those tiny pamphlets and illustrated holy cards about the saints" that Grandma Dwyer used to give Merry, the narrator shows how these associations merge in his mind. For several pages, Angela Davis is described as a saint for the Swede. Seeking proximity to his lost daughter, he not only reads what she was interested in but also lets himself get obsessed in the way she got obsessed. 

In these pages, the boundaries between the metaphorical and literal are hazy. While the formulation "St. Angela" mostly seems rhetorical, the reader nevertheless gets the impression that the Swede looks upon Angela Davis as an actual saint and literally prays to her. 

At the kitchen table one night Angela Davis appears to the Swede, as Our Lady of Fátima did to those children in Portugal, as the Blessed Virgin did down in Cape May. He thinks, Angela Davis can get me to her—and there she is. Alone in the kitchen at night the Swede begins to have heart-to-heart talks with Angela Davis, at first about the war, then about everything important to both of them.

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In this passage, the metaphorical description of Angela Davis as a saint reinforces the Swede's desperation. On one level, there's a comical absurdity to the idea of an upper middle-class adult man—who isn't particularly politically engaged—staying up in the middle of the night in his suburban home to have heart-to-heart talks with a radical political activist. On another level, however, there's something stirring about the saint metaphor, as it captures the Swede's utter hopelessness as a father. Running out of ways to feel close to his lost daughter, he begins to pray to one of her role models.

In the following pages, the narrator continues to describe the Swede pouring his heart out to "St. Angela." Although he leaves out details she wouldn't approve of—including his father's racist tirades—the Swede tells Angela Davis about his experiences during the 1967 riots and his choice to keep the factory in Newark in their aftermath. These prayers make it clear the Swede seeks Angela Davis's hypothetical blessing in order to feel understood and forgiven by Merry. Nevertheless, the Swede recognizes the unlikelihood of someone like him winning the approval of someone like Angela Davis:

Despite all that he could tell Angela Davis that might favorably influence her about his refusal to desert Newark and his black employees, he knows that the personal complications of that decision could not begin to conform to the utter otherworldiness of the ideal of St. Angela.

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Here, the narrator captures the Swede's challenge to live up to his saint's ideals. While he initially seems to take comfort in Angela Davis's dogmatism, he finds himself unable to square her political views with his worldview. At the end of the day, he still feels convinced that "his daughter knows nothing about dynamite or revolution, that these are just words to her and she blurts them out to make herself feel powerful despite her speech impediment." As the extended St. Angela metaphor comes to an end, the narrator returns to the main reason the Swede makes Angela Davis an object of veneration: his irrational belief that "Angela is the person who knows Merry's whereabouts."

In these three sentences, Roth combines imagery and metaphor to evoke the intense and haunting atmosphere of the Swede's solitary drive. In the first sentence, the narrator paints a harrowing picture of the terrible working conditions that reigned during Newark's industrial heyday, which suggests that the factories could be considered machines of destruction as much as machines of production. The intensity and violence evoked in the beginning of the sentence contrast sharply with the haunting stillness of the tomb metaphor at the end. This metaphor is developed further in the second sentence, in which the characters' pessimistic view of the city is conveyed in the figurative image of Newark "entombed" in the deserted and sealed up factories. In the third sentence, this metaphor becomes even more specific. The factories aren't just any kind of tomb—more specifically, they're pyramids. This new layer is compatible with the characters' nostalgic mythologizing of Newark's past. Seeing the city's industrial past as a "great dynasty," people like Swede can't help but feel a certain awe for the immense, dark buildings he passes. 

This first sentence of Chapter 8 encapsulates the Swede's split experience of the dinner party. On the surface, he's spending a normal summer evening in the company of his family and friends, eating good food and having laidback conversations. Below the surface, however, he's feverishly doubting every aspect of his life and world. While the main part of the sentence captures the on-the-surface reality, the clause within the em dashes captures what he's experiencing on the inside. These two realities couldn't be more different—a contrast Roth draws attention to through the coffin metaphor. While life and time continue on around him in the reality of the dinner party, he feels on the inside as though he will be confined in a coffin for the rest of eternity.

A few sentences later, the narrator returns to the coffin metaphor and the contrast between the activity of the outer world and his inner sense of permanent immobility: "A lifetime's agility as a businessman, as an athlete, as a U.S. Marine, had in no way conditioned him for being a captive confined to a futureless box where he was not to think about what had become of his daughter." While the coffin metaphor might initially seem to point to something the Swede doesn't want, it turns out that immobility and entrapment are actually coping mechanisms. To get through dinner and the rest of his life, the Swede has to keep himself from "thinking about the only things he could think about." He realizes that "however much he might crave to get out, he was to remain stopped dead in the moment in that box. Otherwise the world would explode."

The coffin metaphor sets the tone for the chapter. Although the narrator doesn't explicitly mention the figurative coffin again until the end of the chapter, the metaphor shapes the way the reader pictures the Swede as the dinner party unfolds.