Dec 27, 2009

The Diamond Mine | Style

Metaphor
When a reader picks up Cather's story, he or she might expect that it is about an actual diamond mine. However, as the narrator illustrates, the title is a metaphor, a figure of speech that is used to represent something else. This metaphor is explained a few paragraphs into the story, when the narrator overhears someone say of the opera singer, ‘‘That woman's a diamond mine.’’ The narrator, who is ‘‘an old friend of Cressida Garnet,’’ is ‘‘sorry to hear that mining operations were to be begun again.’’ When the narrator says this, she further...