One day you're walking down the street, and you spot a man talking on his cell phone. He's speaking another language entirely, something about calls and margins and taxable yields. As both of you pass each other, he gives you a brief quarter-smile and keeps talking into his radiation box. The homeless man on the corner shakes his head ceaselessly, and you can't help but wonder if you should join in.
You get home that night and flip on the television and watch an award-winning show about nothing. You change the channel and there are several women lying to a man and a man lying to several women. You change the channel and a bomb 2500 miles away explodes in front of your very eyes. You change the channel and a disenfranchised youth is sitting in front of the television, flipping channels. You change the channel and you see that familiar quarter-smiling face in a quarter-box above a quarter-body reading you the day's script. Seems he's made himself quite the killing on the market.
Suddenly in your head everything is connected. People get rich trading pieces of paper. Men are lying, women are lying, bombs are dropping, and the youth are quietly fading into zombies, which is unfortunate, because it is the robots who will inherit the earth. These people don't do, they react. They're metapeople, feeding off of other's energy - not creating, just conserving. Life, momentum, inertia, gravity, education, sex, warfare, welfare, nature, nurture, money, guns, and anomie: you are an extended metaphor. But what do you represent?
You sigh and change the channel. Two very rich gladiators square off with a bat and a ball. It's hard enough to wake up in the morning.
An extended metaphor is like a regular metaphor, only extended. Okay, that wasn't exactly the brightest thing to write down, but it's true. Let's review:
A metaphor is a comparison between two objects or ideas which at first glance seem unalike. A metaphor is made without explicitly noting that it is a comparison by using "like" or "as".
Example: No man is an island.
An
extended metaphor often goes into long and flowing detail comparing the two items. A famous example would be
William Shakespeare's 18th
sonnet, "
Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer's Day?":
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
Extended metaphors are less common than they were in the 17th and 18th centuries. They are better suited for the poetic license than any other form of literature (prose, drama, etc.). An extended metaphor does not have to have words: many good short films use extended metaphors to reveal their themes and ideas.