extended metaphor

November 21, 2011 3:24 AM

Please help me find a short story or poem that functions as an extended metaphor. Preferably one as obscure or ambiguous in its meaning as possible.

Please no stories longer than 10 pages, and obviously as good quality as possible. Classic examples will also be welcome.

posted by leibniz to media & arts (22 answers total)

Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants?
posted by neushoorn at 3:42 AM on November 21, 2011 [2 favorites]

I can't remember how long it is, but maybe "the Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman... or maybe one of her others? Also "the rape of the lock" by pope, "the monkey's paw", "the necklace" by guy de Maupassant and Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories might interest you. (sorry my shift key is being pretty lame)
posted by misspony at 3:49 AM on November 21, 2011

Kafka's Hunger Artist?
posted by Cocodrillo at 4:00 AM on November 21, 2011

Johnathon Livingstone Seagull by Richard Bach would be a good fit.
posted by v.barboni at 4:07 AM on November 21, 2011

Ever read the lyrics to the song "American Pie"? You want obscure, that's it.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 4:22 AM on November 21, 2011 [1 favorite]

Julio Cortázar's "Don't Blame Anyone": A man is having a very hard time putting on a sweater and basically gets...lost...doing it. Also there may be an open window in the room. 5-6 pages long.

Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics are each built around taking a scientific concept and integrating it as the basis of a story, with varying levels of literalness. The majority are well within the length you want. The omnibus linked there is available in the US now, and the various individual collections are also mostly easy to get.
posted by Su at 4:31 AM on November 21, 2011 [1 favorite]

Can't recall the length, but While I Stand Here Ironing might work.
posted by backwards guitar at 4:56 AM on November 21, 2011

Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder

also The Christmas Mystery by the same author.

Maybe Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (?Pirsig) but it's 30 years since I read that one.
posted by taff at 5:09 AM on November 21, 2011

Hells bells, they are not the length you requested. I'm very sorry. I have no idea how I missed that detail. I blame the iPhone. I apologise.
posted by taff at 5:10 AM on November 21, 2011

Any poem by Wallace Stevens
posted by mermayd at 5:30 AM on November 21, 2011

A lot of metaphysical poems revolve around one extended metaphor (see for instance John DOnne The Flea, Love's Diet etc.

Oscar Wilde The Nightingale and the Rose (and, of course, Portrait of Dorian Gray, but that is too long)
posted by miorita at 5:41 AM on November 21, 2011

"The Swimmer" by John Cheever.
posted by Malla at 6:19 AM on November 21, 2011 [2 favorites]

Plato's allegory of the cave is about as classic as you could get.

I'd also suggest Harrison Bergeron.
posted by nakedmolerats at 6:23 AM on November 21, 2011

I think these answers would be far superior if they supplied some discussion or analysis of the metaphor.
posted by Mr. Justice at 6:54 AM on November 21, 2011

Donne is the master of this. A classic example is "The Flea", an extended unusual metaphor (or "conceit"), which turns a flea into a metaphor for sex. "To His Mistress Going to Bed" does something similar, in which "O, my America, my Newfoundland" is all a coy way of talking about his lover's body.
A lot of this went over my head in high school, and many people just think of Donne as a religious poet, "No Man is an Island, etc." But the man wrote really complex, intricate, difficult, and dare I say ... sexy poetry. He's more interesting than I used to give him credit for.
posted by bookgirl18 at 7:04 AM on November 21, 2011

Another possibility might be Gerard Manley Hopkins's Spring and Fall, in which the subject, leaves falling and seasons changing, is really an extended discussion about mortality, aging, and faith. Not sure if that satisfies your criteria exactly ... but it sure is one of my favorite poems.
posted by bookgirl18 at 7:11 AM on November 21, 2011

T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men?

Reading it, it seems like a fantasy version of an alternate reality where these scarecrow-like dudes run around, but according to what I vaguely remember from AP English in high school, it's all about the futility of life, and according to Wikipedia's article on The Hollow Men: it is recognised to be concerned most with post-World War I Europe under the Treaty of Versailles (which Eliot despised: compare "Gerontion"), the difficulty of hope and religious conversion, and, as some critics argue, Eliot's own failed marriage (Vivienne Eliot may have been having an affair with Bertrand Russell).
posted by saveyoursanity at 7:37 AM on November 21, 2011

My first thought would be Borges, many of whose middle and later works function as extended, perhaps fanciful, explorations of the world-as-library, world-as-labyrinth, world-as-world-sized-map, and so on.
posted by gauche at 7:46 AM on November 21, 2011

My senior year English class in high school had a unit on "absurd" stories, i.e. surreal and satirical, and long on metaphors. Europeans are good at this.


The Nose by Nikolai Gogol--From wikipedia: "it tells of a St. Petersburg official whose nose leaves his face and develops a life of its own."

Before the Law by Kafka--A man spends his whole life waiting before a door in order to gain admission to "the Law".

"Oriflamme" by Eugene Ionesco--the corpse of a stranger grows so large it threatens to take over the house of a married couple. I can't for the life of me find this one online, but you can MeMail if you want and I'll send you scans of my copy.

I would assume Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote stories like this, but I have no great love for him and can't think of any off the top of my head.
posted by book 'em dano at 3:26 PM on November 21, 2011

James Merrill, for my money, is the modern master of the extended metaphor: take a poem like 'Christmas Tree', where the cut tree becomes a metaphor for the poet's impending death from AIDS.

I also have a soft spot for Alan Brownjohn's 'A Bad Cat Poem', where the cat flap is a metaphor for .. well, you work it out:

In the spring of their hope you saw them crouching,
He outside in the sunshine and she inside,
And handling this bad cat back and forth, to and fro
Through the flap. And back through the flap.
They were trying to coax it to work the flap.

That summer the cat was not learning at all,
Though they pushed it persistently, head
First and tail last, towards each other
Through the yielding flap in the humid dark,
She inside, he outside, with fists full of moulted hairs.

And by the autumn still it had not learnt,
While the air was not kindly any more:
The flap on its hinges grated, he outside
Forcing hard the reluctant brute to her inside,
Who received it with aching hands.

It had to be winter next: it would not learn now.
It had never made it once of its own accord:
It had only ever let itself passively
Be jostled to and fro through the grinding hole,
To and fro, back and forth, she inside, he outside,

And both of them getting horribly impatient.
posted by verstegan at 3:15 AM on November 22, 2011 [1 favorite]

Thanks for all your answers everyone. I ended up using Kafka's The Hunger Artist in the end. The Julio Cortázar short story sounds very interesting as well- but I can't find a copy of it online anywhere. I don't suppose anyone has an electronic copy?
posted by leibniz at 7:10 AM on November 22, 2011

The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe is a great example of it, except everyone reads it when they're a kid, thinks it's about a creepy bird, and doesn't think about it much more.

I heard this poem again earlier in the year for the first time since childhood and it was stunning. It is a spot-on metaphor for depression (the raven symbolizes depression, and his reaction to the raven's initial novelty quickly fades to bitterness and paranoia and abandonment issues and finally wanting it to leave but it never will). But there are also other ways to view it, for example that he had been driven mad in a more literal psychotic way by missing Lenore -- that is, the raven is a real raven and not purely a symbol, but that is just an even stronger example of depression. Then you could also wonder if the spirit of Lenore is inhabiting the raven and seeks revenge for something he might have done, like kill her -- i.e his regret goes deeper than missing someone who is gone because he is responsible. Thus Lenore-as-raven will never let him forget what he's done.

You could also view the raven as less a symbol for depression in general as mourning in particular; that is, his missing Lenore is like a persistent black bird constantly saying her name, over and over, forever. It's the kind of grief one cannot overcome.
posted by Nattie at 9:19 PM on November 22, 2011