Similes

The two writers/speakers that contribute to A Tale for the Time Being have two very different voices, as should be expected.  They also have two very different approaches to keeping the reader engaged, as I have noticed.  As I drag myself through Ruth Ozeki’s sections, I have started trying to pick out reasons why her writing as an established author isn’t as interesting as some teenage girl’s diary.  One specific difference I have noticed thus far is the use of figurative language.  More specifically, their use of similes.

You would think a successful author like Ruth Ozeki would have interesting and engaging sentences that would provide the reader with imagery that would spice up her not-so-interesting life.  The most interesting sentence I have found in these first 80 or so pages was “her sentences were peppered with slang” (29).  I absolutely love when authors used “peppered” in their writing, so I am sure I am slightly biased about this sentence.  However, the author never really seems to say anything interesting unless it is about Nao, the other writer in this novel.  As far as similes go, I had to comb her chapters just to find the few she used to make her own writing more interesting included “it looked like two moons talking” (40) and “her fingers, which lay in her lap like dead things” (65).  Don’t get me wrong, I will take whatever I can get to make Ozeki’s chapters more interesting, and these similes do stand out from the rest of her flatter sentences depicting her boring life on Boring Island married to Mr. Boring with their two boring cats.  However, these similes aren’t the most fantastic things I’ve ever read.  What would two moons talking look like?  What kind of dead things would her fingers look like?  These similes are ambiguous enough to the point where they add very little to her writing.

Nao, on the other hand, peppers her writing (I really do love that verb) with various similes and metaphors.  Opening the book to a random page in one of her chapters Nao wrote provided me with more examples of figurative language than Ozeki has used since the book started.  Not only does Nao have a large variety of similes, but I actually enjoyed the imagery that they provided me with.  “Time isn’t something that you can spread out like butter or jam” (25).  Nao had no idea that her writing would become part of a novel or that time would become a huge symbol in this novel, and yet she was still better able to give an actual visual of time.  One of my favorite lines that Nao wrote was a simile, “I feel like a little wave person, floating around the stormy sea of my life” (42).  She connects the Japanese character that had been given to her after she hadn’t passed her entrance exams to how she felt in the world in general.  Its not a particularly brilliant simile, but she is just a teenage girl after all and I thought in the context she used the simile in it was beautiful.

Similes should be used to make abstract ideas something that the reader can be visualized.  This is an idea that most writers seem to understand and take advantage of, however, in the case of this novel it isn’t used nearly enough by the speaker that should have a much more advanced literary grasp.  I think I have definitely honed in on a reason why certain chapters drag on more than others.

An Attempt at Structure...

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki has two very different speakers that alternate every chapter.  The first is a young girl named Nao, who immediately tells whoever happens to find her journal that she plans on killing herself as soon as she has finished writing.  Then, there is the author telling her own story and her reactions to Nao’s journal in a third person limited voice.  I will be the first to admit that the author’s chapters are a cannonball chained to Nao’s chapters’ feet.  So while my eyes glaze over her rambling on about her life, I started to notice how the chapters were structured.  The narrator had mentioned how Nao’s entries were undated, so there was no real way of knowing exactly how much time was passing in between. However, she noticed certain clues: “the changing hues of ink, as well as shifts in the density or angle of handwriting, which seemed to indicate breaks in time or mood.  If she studied these, she might be able to break up the diary into hypothetical intervals...and pace herself accordingly” (38).  So as I forced my eyes over the story behind how she ended up living on some island in Canada I realized that the breaks she had made in Nao’s chapters likely corresponded with the breaks Ozeki noticed in the actual diary itself.  Within each chapter are numbered section, and Nao’s sections are clearly separate entries, although each section usually references the one before or elaborates on something she touched on.  Nao finishes one section saying “You’re my kind of time being and together we’ll make magic!” and then begins the next “Ugh.  That was dumb” (4). Most of her sections directly respond to each other, and then each chapter she begins a new topic or story or just set of random thoughts that she needed to get down.  I have found that its actually very similar to my own notebook I keep for class, where the piece I am actually working on gets interrupted from time to time by thoughts that need to make it onto the page.

Then, after a chapter of interesting thoughts and stories told from an active perspective, comes a chapter from the author.  What I have noticed is that she tries to mimic the same structure that she gave to Nao’s entries.  However, she never uses the same numbers of sections and her writing never seems to clearly lineup with Nao’s.  She does continue her train of thought, similarly to how Nao does, but usually just elaborates on the last thought of the previous section.  Occasionally she discusses Nao, but so far its just her own life.  My personal preference would be if the sections actually related to Nao’s or lined up with them so it could be clear how the two chapters relate to each other, as opposed to just being back to back.  However, this is not the case and I am just going to have to suffer through passive chapters before I can learn more about Nao’s fate.