A simile is a comparison of two unalike things that uses the word like or as. Early on, Leroy's truck is described as looking "like a gigantic bird that has flown home to roost." Similarly, Leroy now realizes that when he was constantly on the road, "He was always flying past scenery." If his rig is like one huge bird, then, in it, he would fly past everything rather than really noticing what was happening around him (like how his marriage is failing).

Two more similes are created by the description of the body of Leroy and Norma Jean's son, Randy, who died as an infant. Leroy felt, then, "as though he were offering [the nurse] a large doll as a present. A dead baby feels like a sack of flour." First, Randy's small body is compared to a doll's, and then he is compared to a sack of flour. He would have been so small, at just four months old, that he felt more like a toy or an object than a person.

When the narrator explains the drives that Leroy takes to look at houses in the new developments, he feels "like a criminal rehearsing for a robbery": another simile. When he considers how he must have sounded to hitchhikers, he feels it must have been "like some teenage-tragedy song": yet another simile.

A metaphor is a comparison of two unalike things where one is said to be the other; there is no like or as involved. When Leroy and Norma Jean are in Shiloh, he considers the "house ... of logs" that he'd wanted to build for her, and he realizes that, like the history he knows, it is "similarly empty—too simple." The log cabin seems to become a metaphor for the Moffitt's marriage: Leroy always promised to build Norma Jean a lovely house, but he never got around to it when he was driving. Now, he wants to do it, but she no longer wants it, because it simply isn't enough to save their empty marriage.