The Satanic Verses: Metaphors 6 key examples

This metaphor exaggerates the height and stakes of Rekha's death by comparing the apartment building from which she fell to Mount Everest. But it's also a pun: because the building is called Everest Vilas (home to the most expensive apartments in Bombay; the Everest of housing, so to speak), Rekha did really fall from Everest. This pun is actually an extension of Rushdie's metaphor: it allows the exaggerated stakes of the event to exist in a concrete form that remains pertinent throughout the novel. 

In fact, the idea of "falling from Everest," both literal and metaphorical, appears often throughout the novel. In the opening pages, Gibreel and Saladin fall from exactly the height of Everest. In the closing pages, Allie Cone falls from Everest Vilas, just like Rekha Merchant. And Maurice Wilson, a climber who fell from Everest in 1934, recurs in Allie's visions and offers an important way to understand her ambitions and character. 

This kind of fall has broader resonances with the Biblical fall of Satan from heaven, which help clarify how it functions in the novel. To fall from Everest, the tallest point in the world, is to descend from heavenly heights and plunge back to earth. This kind of fall aligns with the book's emphasis on how good and evil are never simple or static: instead they shift, change shape, fall, rise, and evolve. Once one is at the highest place in the world (literally, metaphorically, financially, or even spiritually), Rushdie argues, the only way to go is down. 

In this passage, the spiky and unwieldy kipper on Saladin's plate serves as a metaphor for England, and the fact that "nobody would ever tell him how to eat it" describes the general atmosphere of xenophobia and prejudice he experiences. But this is a formative moment for Saladin, and for the reader's understanding of his character: rather than protest against the difficulty he encounters, he sits for an hour and a half and eats the fish. This experience makes Saladin feel that to eat the kipper well, both literally and metaphorically, would be a true accomplishment. In other words, Saladin wants to feel truly English. 

Rushdie himself is critical of this position—not least by having Saladin's scornful attitude toward his homeland of India be a major factor in his transformation into the devil. But the metaphor of the kipper captures it perfectly. Though an unpleasant scene, it's also undeniably British.

To be "the sixth toe on the foot of the Universal Thing" is a phrase designed to be funny. It's a great example of how Rushdie uses humor to color and exaggerate his narrative. Here, the phrase demonstrates the superiority Gibreel feels over Maslama, and clarifies that, in Rushdie's eyes, Maslama's prostration is, frankly, embarrassing. 

As in this example, Rushdie's humor is often wielded against religious fundamentalism. By articulating extreme examples of religious fervor with dry humor and condescension, Rushdie demonstrates skepticism that can verge on a scathing rebuke. This kind of humor is also highly entertaining—which makes it not only a key element in the rapid and propulsive nature of Rushdie's narrative, but also an even more effective tool to question the legitimacy of religious fundamentalism. 

This passage contains a series of metaphors that describe what it is like to be an exile: "a dream of glorious return," a "vision of revolution," an "endless paradox," a "ball hurled high into the air." Rushdie's metaphors constantly shift and change; they are never rooted in place and never linger on one way of saying something for long. This rootlessness matches the experience of being an exile.

The Imam also articulates a paradox in this passage: "looking forward by always looking back." While The Imam uses this paradox to characterize the experience of exile—the idea of thinking of one's homeland as the site of both the past and the anticipated future—it is also helpful for understanding Rushdie's stance on religion and history. To Rushdie, stories are a way of relating the past to the future: they allow interpretation and history to affect events in the real world. 

The Imam's metaphors and paradox engage with the repeated question of whether, as Gibreel puts it, "to be born again, first you have to die." Is change legitimate if it is always "looking back?" Can people ever escape the past—and should they try?

This line is a metaphor likening language to courage. It helps clarify Jumpy's position, and his resentment of Hanif's ability to use language to provoke the events he desires. But it also illuminates Rushdie's own attitude toward language. To Rushdie, language is a way of directly acting on the world. It has tangible, practical impacts. Just as myth and reality blur in The Satanic Verses, language, for Rushdie, blurs with life. 

But this metaphor and this stance are slippery. The idea of speaking something and "by doing so making it true" is a logical fallacy: though language has power and is capable of inspiring tangible impact, a gap remains between merely speaking something and making it true. This gap illuminates another way of interpreting the relationship between language and reality. For Rushdie, language doesn't simply describe reality: it also plays an active role in defining reality in the first place. If a person can convince people that something is true, Rushdie might argue, doesn't that mean that, for all intents and purposes, it is true? With both these interpretations of Jumpy's metaphor, Rushdie spotlights the way language plays a crucial role in constructing reality. 

The use of figurative language here also conveys Saladin's attitude toward the approaching confrontation. Saladin's simile compares Gibreel to the Indian tectonic plate drifting toward Laurasia— which, in the simile, is Saladin himself. This simile highlights the stakes Saladin feels are involved in the upcoming meeting—they are continental, world-shaping, tectonic, capable of "hurling up Himalayas." Moreover, by referencing their mutual homeland of India, situates such conflict as some kind of cultural collision. 

In the next sentence, though, Saladin remarks on his own simile by calling it a "pretty strange association." It's as if he feels this simile has emerged from his subconscious: it's a direct reflection of how he feels about Saladin, despite its strangeness. The metaphors that conclude this passage are along the same lines. A mountain is "an obstacle; a transcendence; above all, an effect." But these metaphors again comment on the situation as if from a birds-eye view; they feel, in fact, like Rushdie himself chiming in about Saladin's simile. If the upcoming collision of Gibreel and Saladin will create "Himalayas," these metaphors are Rushdie asking: what does that really mean? They clarify the foreshadowing in this passage as not simply the build-up to the meeting of Gibreel and Saladin, but also the build-up to the thematic and narrative effect such a meeting will produce.