Scythe: Similes 5 key examples

Citra feels as though she watches a tennis match, but quickly realizes that "she was the ball. And so was Rowan." This uses a common metaphorical idea, comparing an argument to a tennis match, going back and forth. But in the ironic style of the novel's narrator, Citra and Rowan become the ball in that tennis match. This rather ridiculous image emphasizes the apprentices' position as pawns in the larger conflict between the disagreeing factions in the Conclave.

Note that sport remains an important part of the post-mortal world; it is one of the relatively few parts of human culture before the Thunderhead that appear to remain intact. Citra notes earlier in the novel that she played tennis herself, so this metaphor may be especially relevant to her own experience. 

As Rowan tries to eat and speak, the pain in his mouth and lips feels "as if he were speaking through the blowhole of a whale." This simile is complex and has multiple interpretations. For one, Shusterman uses this figurative language to focus on Rowan's lips. This is because the lips are a particularly important body part to the Scythedom, as people must kiss a scythe's ring to gain immunity. Thus the extreme pain on his lips is an ironic reversal of the usual association of the lips with immunity in the novel. Perhaps Scythes Chomsky and Rand beat Rowan especially brutally on his face as an intentional mockery of his pain.

Another important interpretation of the simile is the narrator's comparison of Rowan to an animal. The life and safety of animals forms an important counterpoint to the world-building in the novel. While human beings have made medical advances that allow them to live forever, this privilege has seemingly been extended to no animals other than humans. The development of immortality separates people from animals in the novel, delineating humans as a special group that no longer has to die like all other beings. As a result, when Shusterman's figurative language compares Rowan to an animal, the imagery is especially potent. With his pain nanites turned off, Rowan must experience bodily pain and risk death again, like an animal. Such comparisons to animals happen throughout the novel in order to show moments when the medical advances of the post-mortal world in fact cannot prevent all possible suffering. Human beings privileged themselves in creating the post-mortal world, but language like this reminds the reader that these seemingly immortal people are still creatures at risk of pain and death.

This quite graphic simile emphasizes just how evil Goddard is in Curie's view. It might have sufficed to say Goddard is "corrosive as acid." But the simile specifies "in the eye," which evokes the cruel and unusual gleaning methods that Goddard and his team prefer. (Note that it is also these practices that Curie criticizes.)

The simile's focus on the eye also reflects how Goddard often uses showman tactics to gain attention in the novel. Goddard plays up an evil character for the public, so it is appropriate that Curie should describe his acid entering the eye. In contrast, though, the eye in the simile also draws attention to Goddard's penchant for secrecy in his true plans and attentions. In her research with the Thunderhead, Citra attempts to use cameras, another kind of eye, to see what Goddard really did to Faraday. As such, the simile's specific focus on the eye also elaborates Goddard's character in multiple ways.

The narrator ruefully observes that Xenocrates looked like "an oversized net of fish." Note that the narrator compares Xenocrates to small, relatively insignificant animals that are about to die for human benefit. This is quite the degrading description for someone with Xenocrates's lofty position. Goddard told Xenocrates to jump in the water or else Goddard would reveal that Xenocrates secretly fathered Esme, which is illegal under the Scythe Commandments. After Xenocrates accepts the blackmail and jumps in the water, he appears as merely a sack of animal life. This image emphasizes how many of the natural, animalistic facts of being human are removed by the Scythedom. Xenocrates's transgression was having a child, a very natural thing. In much the same way, when he jumps in the pool, he reveals himself to be only natural, a sack of fish—just as he reveals himself to have followed the natural process of having a child.

This simile is part of a larger theme in the novel, in which Shusterman investigates how the medical and technological advances of the post-mortal world change humanity's relationship to the natural world. By achieving immortality, human beings separate themselves from animals and other life, making themselves fundamentally unnatural. But the characters in the novel sometimes revert to more natural states. Shusterman uses images of animals, like the one above, in a variety of ways to show that even in the post-mortal age, at their core, humans are still natural beings who are, after all, animals themselves.

Rowan beats Chomsky with the "toning mallet" "like the hammer of Thor." This simile alludes to the Mjolnir, the hammer of the Norse thunder god Thor. One of Thor's most important qualities, as described in the mythology, is his complete, unrelenting slaughter of his foes. Here Rowan, like Thor, seems totally committed to beating Chomsky to death and beyond. He beats him repetitively, again as Thor would, so much that it is "as if he were toning the hour." This toning of the hour was one of the practices of the Tonist cult. As such, in his attack on Chomsky, Rowan emulates both Thor's hammer and the practices of the Tonists. Rowan attacks Chomsky with a force that is divine in its strength and intention—both the mortal-age divinity of Thor and the post-mortal divinity of the Tonists.