The Wall

“You look for metaphors. It’s cold as slate, as diamond, as the moon. Cold as charity—that’s a good one. But you soon realize that the thing about the cold is that it isn’t a metaphor. It isn’t like anything else. It’s nothing but a physical fact. This kind of cold, anyway. Cold is cold is cold.”

Lanchester introduces the Wall, an important part of the novel’s setting, by having Joseph try out different ways of defining the Wall. In this passage, he attempts to use figurative language. Though he mentions metaphor, he’s actually evoking similes, where something is compared to something else using “like” or “as.”

Life on the Wall tends to flatten the personalities of Defenders. The physical conditions are brutal. As a new Defender, Joseph is just beginning to accept this reality, one that no amount of figurative language can hide. Living inland allows people to deny the reality of climate change, but the Wall is too concrete to permit such denial. The simile comparing the wall to charity is ironic since the Wall is the exact opposite of charity, especially to Others. Joseph’s use of irony helps to characterize him as witty and with a sense of humor.

“Prose is misleading, though, when it comes to saying what it feels and seems like. The days are the same, with variations in the weather, and the view is the same, with variations in the visibility, and the people on either side of you are the same, so it’s static; it’s not a story, it’s an image which is fixed-with-variations. It’s a poem and as I already said, it’s a concrete poem with a few repeating elements. One would be concrete itself: concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete.”

Joseph’s play on language is an example of metanarrative—narrative that calls attention to its status as a form of storytelling. Here, Joseph is attempting to use language to capture the monotony of