🎯 One Image, Expanding
🎯 One Image, Expanding
A sailor in a Victorian novel does not just describe the ocean. The ocean becomes a living thing — it breathes, it waits, it remembers. By the final paragraph, the whole passage has been colonised by water: the crowd surges, the noise swells, the city floods the streets. The writer has built a single comparison across four pages. That is an extended metaphor.
Spotting it as one instance scores one mark. Tracing how it builds scores at the top of the mark scheme.
English Language glossary
- What is an extended metaphor and how does it differ from a single metaphor?
- <strong>A single metaphor</strong> makes a comparison once: 'the crowd was a tide'. It illuminates a moment.<br><br><strong>An extended metaphor</strong> sustains and develops that comparison across multiple sentences or the whole passage. Each new use adds to the comparison: 'the crowd surged', 'bodies flooded the street', 'the noise swelled'. By the close, the comparison has accumulated weight and possibly changed direction.<br><br><strong>What AQA rewards:</strong> not spotting the metaphor but tracing how it <em>builds</em> -- what it establishes, how it is complicated, and what the writer achieves by sustaining it to the end.
A single metaphor makes a comparison. An extended metaphor sustains and develops that comparison across multiple sentences, paragraphs, or the whole passage. With each new use, the comparison gains weight — new elements are added, the original comparison is complicated, and by the close it means something differe
Now try it yourself
Quiz · Question 1 of 10
Which of the following best describes an extended metaphor?
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