The Satanic Verses

In this passage, Rushdie uses a sequence of similes to describe how Pamela reacts to events or scenarios that activate the traumas of her past: Pamela feels "like a husk, like an empty peanut-shell, a monkey without a nut." These similes all indicate that Pamela feels hollow, as if she were only the shell of a person, not any actual substance. The constant shifting of the similes, meanwhile, matches the panic and uncertainty Pamela feels in these difficult moments. Moreover, the way these similes, and this description more broadly, interrupts the novel's larger narrative only briefly matches the way Pamela's panic only bursts through into her actions "maybe once a week." Overall, Rushdie uses these similes to not only describe Pamela's predicament, but to demonstrate it in action.  

This passage concludes with a simile that compares Gibreel's voice to vomit pouring "all over" Mahound. It's the perfect capstone to a passage that, throughout, confuses Gibreel's agency with Mahound's. Though Gibreel claims "archangels can't lose such fights," Mahound eventually forces his mouth open and makes him speak. Gibreel's speech is Mahound's decision, not his own, and the result is a "Voice" that Rushdie likens to vomit. 

Rushdie's description of Mahound overpowering Gibreel is part of a larger pattern. Gibreel, though supposedly an angel, is often powerless before those who would like to use his authority to validate their own words. This pattern is a radical take on religion and a scathing rejection of fundamentalism; it's also, by nature, sacrilegious. This scene was a major factor in the fatwa issued for Salman Rushdie. But it's also a powerful exploration of the way religion interacts with agency, language, and power. 

This passage describes how the village of Titlipur relates to a large banyan tree in the center of town. The banyan is essential to the identity of the village, and the villagers respect its animal inhabitants as if they were human. But they ignore the butterflies, like, Rushdie writes, "hopes long since shown to be false."

The final sentence of this passage foreshadows Ayesha's rise to power and prominence. By emphasizing the butterflies, which the reader already knows to be associated with Ayesha, Rushdie creates an expectation that something will change: that, at the least, the butterflies will be newly acknowledged. The simile comparing the butterflies to "hopes long since shown to be false," meanwhile, influences how readers perceive Ayesha's association with butterflies. This sentence frames Ayesha as someone who will rekindle hopes that have died out—who will give the villagers hope in a direction they long ago ruled out. 

But the notion of such hopes being "false" also functions as a warning. The hopes the butterflies represent are not "extinguished" or "dormant"; they are "false"—a state which is permanent, not temporary. Rushdie's simile therefore warns that Ayesha is leading the villagers toward false promises by selling them false hopes. 

Broadly, these two registers—that Ayesha awakens hopes, but that they are false—are both essential to understanding Ayesha and her pilgrimage. Throughout this narrative, even after the drowning of the pilgrims, it's never fully clear whether Ayesha was a false prophet or a true messenger of Gibreel. This ambiguous terrain is Rushdie's specialty: where hopes are false, but perhaps still real.

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. 

In this passage, Rushdie describes the fire with intricate imagery that hinges on alliteration ("buds are blossoming into bushes," "climbing like creepers") and an extended simile ("it is like watching a luminous garden..."). The alliteration, in which letters seem to spread from word to word, matches the way fire spreads through the cafe. The simile, meanwhile, separates readers from the fire's violence and destruction, which aligns with the passive manner in which TV crews film the scene. The sentence itself also resembles a "tangled" and "overgrown" "garden of dense intertwined chimeras." Broadly, then, Rushdie uses intense visual imagery to depict the appearance and atmosphere of the scene.