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Irony
Definition of Metaphor
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor can be stated explicitly, as... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other... read full definition
Troubled About My Soul
Explanation and Analysis—Bigger than the World:
Following an awkward goodnight kiss, Fonny and Tish do not speak for a long time. But, when they meet again after a few weeks, Tish is still utterly in love with Fonny. As they ride the subway to Fonny's apartment in Greenwich Village, Tish looks into his face with adoration verging on hyperbole and struggles even to describe it, settling for absurd metaphors:
He was the most beautiful person I had seen in all my life.
[...] I suddenly looked up into his face. No one can describe this, I really shouldn't try. His face was bigger than the world, his eyes deeper than the sun, more vast than the desert, all that had ever happened since time began was in his face.
Despite his "old" clothes, scuffed shoes, and the fact that "he smelled of fatigue," Tish is still infatuated with him, calling him the most beautiful person she has ever seen. Because of this, she thinks "no one can describe" what his face looks like, so she can only use metaphorical terms that are dramatically hyperbolic: his eyes are "deeper than the sun" and so on. These metaphors do not actually attempt to describe Fonny's face; instead, Tish uses them to show just how difficult it is to describe it.
Then, the train rocks and Fonny holds Tish closer. She becomes aware of his body as a real, physical thing, of a normal size, as it presses against her. She finds this development very important to her relationship and to her own life:
It's astounding the first time you realize that a stranger has a body—the realization that he has a body makes him a stranger. It means that you have a body, too. You will live with this forever, and it will spell out the language of your life.
The hyperbole in the first passage—that his face is "more vast than the desert," etc.—in fact only reinforces how Tish loves Fonny's real, physical self, with his normal body. This focus makes it yet more tragic, then, that Fonny's unjust imprisonment takes his body away from Tish.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—The Changing Envelope:
If Beale Street Could Talk alternates between Tish visiting her lover Fonny in prison and Tish telling stories of their young courtship and romance. While Fonny is in prison, he and Tish can only talk on the phone while their bodies are separated. As a result, Tish's memories of their time together often focus on Fonny's body. In the passage below, Tish remembers when she and Fonny had sex for the first time. In the flashback, Fonny has just turned on the light and the two look at themselves, splayed out and naked. Tish describes what she sees using a metaphor:
Fonny's body was a total mystery to me—the body of one's lover always is, no matter how well one gets to know it: it is the changing envelope which contains the gravest mystery of one's life.
Tish metaphorically calls Fonny's body a "changing envelope." She feels as if there is a "mystery" about her own life that she can find within the "envelope" of his body. This metaphor clarifies why Tish feels so devoted to Fonny despite the strains on their relationship. She not only loves Fonny but, having been attached to him for nearly her whole life, she feels like Fonny helps her define her own personality. They need to continue to be near each other, always a "mystery" to each other, in order to be fully themselves.
This is one of several comments Tish makes about how Fonny's body is a "mystery" or "difficult to describe." The impulse behind these, surely, is that Fonny's body is literally a mystery to her at the time she narrates the story, as he is unjustly held in a prison cell, separated from her by a glass panel. Baldwin often contrasts Tish and Fonny's physical intimacy, described in the flashbacks, with their unfair separation in the novel's main timeline, forming a major theme of the novel.
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Explanation and Analysis—Crossing the Sahara:
Tish visits Fonny in prison early in the book to tell him she is pregnant. When she leaves, distraught to part with Fonny, she remarks upon the prison, using an extended metaphor of the Sahara:
I walked out, to cross those big wide corridors I've come to hate, corridors wider than all the Sahara desert. The Sahara is never empty; those corridors are never empty. If you cross the Sahara, and you fall, by and by vultures circle around you, smelling, sensing, your death. They circle lower and lower: they wait. They know. They know exactly when the flesh is ready, when the spirit cannot fight back. The poor are always crossing the Sahara. And the lawyers and bondsmen and all that crowd circle around the poor, exactly like vultures.
Tish uses the Sahara Desert to represent the difficulty of life as an underprivileged person in contemporary American society. She describes "lawyers and bondsmen," who prey financially on people who struggle to make money or avoid legal trouble, as "exactly like vultures." Tish and her family will experience this kind of scavenging in the book: Hayward, though generally a reasonable man, asks repeatedly for more money for Fonny's legal fees. He is the kind of scavenger that Tish knows is so common, making money off of the suffering of others.
The metaphor is terribly visceral. Tish describes the vultures smelling the dying "flesh" of the poor in disgusting terms. She also uses a general "you," which drives the matter home to the reader—Tish reminds the reader that the vultures might come after them, too, if hard times come. While the novel generally lacks physical violence, this metaphor is a gruesome exception. Tish shows that she is aware of how the structures of power put her family and loved ones in danger. As such, "the Sahara" becomes a metaphor not only for the large, unforgiving halls of the prison, but also for the unjust society in which she lives.
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