What I want to think about, then, and hope we can talk about in class, is the way elaboration can be heaped upon elaboration, figure upon figure, the way an epic simile can set up a series of metaphors, the way metaphors themselves might host further metaphors, and the effect all this figuration has on syntax and grammar.
In the title of his memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Jean-Dominique Bauby offered two further metaphors that captured, like Harmon's glass bubble, the claustrophobia of his condition as well as pointing to the possibility of escape.
In Obama's use, there is a further conceptual metaphor, the Actions Speak Louder than Words metaphor, in which Acting Is Forceful Communication.
Virtual worlds are being used to understand spatial maps (Weisberg & Newcombe, 2015) and further body metaphor work is being done with motion capture sensors, like the Kinect, to teach students computer coding via dance moves (Parmar et al., 2016).
And the sudden switch from arrow to bird muddles the metaphor further.
Just to carry your metaphor further, both are mirrors to the society and they offer the potential to say, "This is what we are like.
Taking the ecological metaphor further, the "Westernized microbiome" most of us now carry around is in fact an artifact of civilization, no more a wilderness today than, say, the New Jersey Meadowlands.
But "Fountain City" is perhaps most valuable in its cataloging of the emotional state of a writer trapped, to extend Chabon's shipwreck metaphor further, in the hold of a sinking novel.
Mr. Grant, who loves to mix metaphors, takes his rancher metaphor further: "The real problem is that the horses are sick, infected and that the disease of fiscal mismanagement has spread to virtually every horse in the corral except one and do not expect that one, Germany, to remain disease-free much longer".
