Use Of Metaphor In Literature

Snow Yu

Professor Antoine

Core 1

03/19/17

“Life is like a novel. You are the author and every day is a new page.” This quote is one of numerous metaphors in the world that is used in many genres of compositions. Metaphor is a bit like magic in writing, it allows the writer to have control of two unlike things and combined into a sentence. Besides in literature, metaphors are widely used in science, they are the start of new research to new discoveries and it is a way of communicating something that is extraordinary within humans. In a text about using rhetoric and science, Richard Johnson-Sheehan address the main idea of giving an individual interpretation, through looking from the field of science with metaphor in his essay called, “Metaphor

But also, it can be misleading and create miscommunication between the creator and reader. Sometimes, a metaphor is taken literal and it will be hard to change their opinion. It is all from the perspective and environment that an individual grew up with and changes the meaning of a metaphor. Also, a certain metaphor may work for some people but it won’t for others. In an argument essay from Johnson- Sheehan, he counterfeits the disadvantage about metaphor in science. “We cannot make up our minds about how ‘normal’ metaphors work or how they are used, then how are we to resolve these issues with scientific metaphors?” (John-Sheehan, 177). There is limitation to our imagination and it leads to conflict with the cultural views. Metaphor is used as a sophisticate way of sarcasm and as a beautiful lie. Most of Darwin’s ideas are based on metaphor, he reasons by analogy, but at the same time there are some problem of doing so, and the major difficult in Darwin’s text is how to make sense of the process that he described. In “Origin of Species”, his way of explaining Natural Selection makes it confusing and biased, “Man can act only on external and visible characters: nature cares nothing for appearances, except in so far as they may be useful to any being. She can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life” (Darwin, 7). His ideas are vague from multiple metaphors and from a learning perspective, these ideas cannot and should not be taken seriously. In educational purposes, there can be misunderstanding from his metaphors of how it should be understood, what should be a metaphor to analysis Darwin’s reasoning. There is personal and emotion attraction when metaphor is used but there should be a border line of when to use it and take it as literal or