Time and time again Donna Tartt, author of The Goldfinch, manages to impress her audience with her masterful use of figurative language. I often find myself reading her work and trying to emulate her style in my own. On page 115, Theo begins to talk about how hard it is for him to fall sleep and how it "was like tumbling into a pit" (Tartt 115).
To me, this metaphor quite profoundly resonated with the rest of the story because of the earlier events. In the first chapter, the art museum that Theo and his Mom are in explode. He is knocked on to the dusty and hard ground. When he tries to stand up, he breaks through the extremely friable floor onto a lower level of the building. This metaphor of "tumbling into a pit" is the authors way of alluding to Theo's experience in the art museum. This metaphor may also allude to why he is having sleeping problems. This metaphor shows that he is not able to fall asleep because he keeps reliving a traumatic moment of his life. As exemplified by this quote, metaphors always connect two seemingly unrelated sections of the text on a higher level.
After reading this section of the text, I was prompted to learn more about metaphors. I found the section about "dead metaphors" and "mixed metaphors" very interesting because it was new learning for me. I used this website. Click the link below to visit it yourself.
http://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/figures-metaphor.htm
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