He kneeled—a mountain of shirtfront and trousers; a mountain that poured, clambered down, folded itself, re-formed itself: a disorderly massiveness, near to me, fabric-hung-and-draped: Sinai.
“His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft,” by Harold Brodkey
How does a character see the world? Original imagery and metaphors bloom from deeply inhabiting a character’s point of view. This sentence comes from a boy’s perspective, watching his father kneel beside him. From the metaphor and diction, we sense the father is a gigantic, overwhelming, overbearing presence in the boy’s world.
Brodkey’s sentence begins in the concrete, physical world. It’s a simple sentence that establishes the father’s action: “He kneeled.” The em dash creates speed, quickly connecting the first sentence with the emerging image. In a flash, the metaphor enters. It’s a tightly knitted metaphor with the “target,” which is father, implied. Father is implicitly compared to a mountain but still retains some humanness with a “shirtfront and trousers.” The diction of the child enters here with the word, “shirtfront.”
Brodkey’s sentence moves again, and after the semicolon, the human details are stripped, and the “source” or image dominates. The mountain (father) is magical or strangely constituted because it moves unlike a known mountain: “a mountain that poured, clambered down, folded itself, re-formed itself.” With the string of four verbs, energy is injected into the sentence—so much movement! And we’re in the realm of “four-or-more” so there is heightened emotion. The mountain (father) feels like he’s everywhere at once, able to move and act however he wants because he’s a shape-shifter. Brodkey uses epistrophe, the repetition of word(s) at the end of phrases, clauses or sentences, for more rhythm—that echo of “itself.”
After the colon, the father changes again into something far more abstract: “a disorderly massiveness, near to me, fabric-hung-and-draped.” For this transformation, Brodkey took an aspect of the mountain, “massiveness,” and an aspect of the previous version of the metaphor, “fabric-hung-and-draped,” which suggests humanness. The disorderliness is echoed in the jagged, nonlinear syntax created by the phrase “near to me.”
After the final colon, the boy sees his father as “Sinai,” presumably Mount Sinai, the principal site where God appeared to Moses and handed him the Ten Commandments. The boy infuses his father with the divine; he is all-powerful.
Your Turn
Open with a simple sentence, a subject and a verb.
Use an em dash and compare the subject of the previous simple sentence to something. This is the metaphor that will extend throughout the rest of the sentence. Can you combine the image with aspects of your subject (a mountain of shirtfront and trousers)?
Add a semicolon. Now use the image from the metaphor and add four verbs. Don’t feel confined to verbs that require a literal interpretation of the metaphor.
Add a colon and take a piece of that metaphor—here it’s “massiveness” and a piece of the earlier version of the metaphor, “fabric-hung-and-draped.”
Add one more colon and introduce a final powerful image related to the metaphor.
How did it go?
What else do you see?
About Me:
I’ve taught “Style in Fiction,” “Word for Word” and “Cultivating Your Prose” at the University of San Francisco and Stanford Continuing Studies since 2007.
Please visit my website to find all my books: ninaschuyler.com, including my novel Afterword, How to Write Stunning Sentences, and Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal.
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Your description of the "shape-shifting metaphor" is every bit as "stunning" as the original.
He exited carefully—an operator of heavy loads and gravel; an operator who accelerated, shifted down; sifted through motivation; crushed evidence; a sly wheeler-dealer, close to her; influence wielded and blanketed: A Trojan Horse.
This one was quite difficult and I tried to tie it in with a character I am writing about.