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> [...] repeated descriptions of death by drowning. My favorite example is in Jacob’s Room; a scene of some people at a party is interrupted suddenly with a des

• thatjoeoverthr 5y ago
  like this struck me. “poor man! who had no wife, and no children and dined alone in lodgings except for tonight; and in pity for him, life being now strong enough to bear her on again, she began all this business, as a sailor not without weariness sees the wind fill his sail and yet hardly wants to be off again and thinks how, had the ship sunk, he would have whirled round and round and found rest on the floor of the sea.” It’s just a little metaphor but it’s drowning again, specifically a feeling in a common situation (they are at dinner) is likened to a sailor feeling as though he’d prefer to have drowned. Or “he relished the thought of the storm and the dark night and the fishermen striving there. He liked that men should labour and sweat on the windy beach at night; pitting muscle and brain against the waves and the wind; he liked men to work like that, and women to keep house, and sit beside sleeping children indoors, while men were drowned, out there in a storm.” I feel like there’s another passage I’m forgetting. Really though the author only needs to use the imagery of drowning a few times before it looks like a tic. It can be that she is English. They’re so very nautical!
  • jbullock35 5y ago
    Thank you —- these are good examples.