The Thingifying of Characters
Extending the Metaphor
One way that flash can break with tradition is by thingifying a character. What I mean by this is that a character is turned into an extended metaphor. The character, usually the antagonist, is referred to as a real-world object, place, or idea. The character takes on the archetype of being a mother, father, or princess, but then they are compared to through the metaphor as an object such as an upright piano, a warehouse, or a kitchen sink. The possibilities are endless. By combining our ideas of the standard roles of these archetypes and the normal function of these objects or settings, we get something defamiliarized.
They are more hybrid in nature, with some of our stereotypes surviving while others are challenged by the very nature of their combinations. It gives the writer new ways to play against our expectations. It raises the stakes not just for the main character but also for the reader. It pushes us away from the mundane and into the strange due to their juxtaposition. Neither element can be static because there is a new friction here.
Our minds love making categories and putting things into their proper places. The combination here makes this hybrid no longer proper. We see each in a new light by their mixing. We're forced to become open to new possibilities, and that's the main reason for reading stories in the first place.
Let’s look at “My Mother is an abandoned Kmart” by Amy Barnes. Everything Amy writes is slightly or largely slanted, pushed through an irrealism that makes the reader confront their understanding of normal or proper.
in the suburbs. When I left, she was still open for business. Everything was bright and shiny and there were lines out the front door. When I abandoned her, things went downhill. There’s mold and sadness and a labelscar with my name on it over my bedroom door.
Thingifying a character often works best when done in the story's opening. Openings establish the "rules" of the story, and we want to know just how slanted this perspective will be from the very beginning, or it can feel like a trick.
Barnes thingifies the narrator’s mother from the title, allowing it to bleed directly into the first sentence. The structure is inherent in the use of this metaphor. This is a story of comparisons. How the mother was thingified in the past before the narrator left and how she has stayed the same or changed in her thingification now that the narrator has returned home. The metaphor, the thingifying of the mother, creates this story's structure and plot.
Barnes demands a suspension of disbelief in the same regard Tolkien or King do with their fantasy and horror worlds. How can the mother be a Kmart, and the narrator have a room inside her? The reader's sense of logic is being dismantled and put back together with each sentence.
She summons me with a weak blue light that flashes on top of her head, letting me know she’s found my high school prom keychain and hot pink poufy dress, a pink and white knitted poodle on an empty wine bottle, various term papers and wide-lined alphabet practice, my yellowing christening gown, love notes from boys she’s read and read until they’re creased and fingerprinted.
But Barnes is up to the challenge of making this comparison something we're not only intrigued by, but can find the universal through her use of concrete and specific details. These objects are real, tangible, and logical. They are the objects that make up our lives. And the mother, like the items in a Kmart, summons us, wakes up our desire to own things, to make a life out of objects.
“Buy now,” she screams from her porch.
How many of us have felt a particular transactional relationship with our family? We purchase love and affection with our time, our sacrifices, and our living up to a mother's standards, even if that doesn't fit our own logic or desires for how to live a fruitful life.
Obediently, I chase down her blue-light specials like I did as a child. Different each day. Different each hour. I never know what to expect. Will she send home expired canned goods or baby clothes or framed artwork with torn corners?
Are stores and mothers that different? Are they that similar? This story asks you to consider both of these questions. Questions we wouldn't ordinarily ask ourselves. Asking and trying to answer questions we've never thought of or were afraid to think of is a resonance that flash can offer us. A resonance we linger over like walking the aisles of a store, wondering what new product might give us more fulfillment in our lives. The narrator in this story is looking for this kind of fulfillment, returning and giving their mother one more chance to be more than they usually are, to change the power dynamic just this once. Comparisons, in large part, work through the prism of power dynamics. It's harder to compare things that have equal power.
She shakes her head and her pile of blue-light special wigs that she pulled out of a dumpster along with the dinner she’s serving on mismatched melamine. The air conditioning has long since been turned off and she sits in a gray fake fur coat in a gray garden of garden center plants that are really sticks.
So many flash stories and/or drafts sit statically on the page because they haven't figured out how to create movement, a sense of urgency, or an escalation from the central problem. But here, couched so well in the central metaphor, we get movement through the mother's metaphorical dying, this going out of business. And the narrator could leave her like this, the way we all do when a store is gone, and only a memory, but the narrator offers the mother a chance to leave behind the metaphor to face this reckoning by shifting the power dynamic by coming to live with the narrator. Here is the turn, a climax that makes this a story over vignette—a story versus a cool concept or playing around with metaphor.
“Move in with me,” I ask her.
“People need to be here,” she tells me.
“Do you need to be here? I ask.
But the mother refuses to change, refuses to drop the metaphor. She is entrenched. Thingified characters, even as antagonists, often face this kind of dilemma—stay the same, stay safe in the metaphor, or crack and break out and become something new, different. This also comes at the cost of power and hierarchy, so many of us refuse this. It's universal but also specific for each of us.
She scans my face with her hands and waves me on.
And here, Barnes could have left us with this last image of the metaphor. She could have left us with the crumbling, going-out-of-business mother, knowing that the narrator will not get the close relationship she desired and will not get a balancing of power. And this would have hit us emotionally, but Barnes takes this a step further by bringing in another character, a sister, at the last second.
My sister is waiting behind me for her shopping bag. She has not abandoned my mother in the suburbs. Her bag is full of fresh produce and cash and clean laundry and bonus gifts like wrapped scissors and pizza from the snack bar.
The mother, this abandoned Kmart, is better off than it seemed to our narrator. No, this mother was holding back a better ability to share the balance of power, a way of caring for the sibling she can't/won't offer our narrator. And this subversion of what we expected is another emotional punch. Love is metered out through specific objects and items that are demonstrably better. In a world of commerce, richer, fresher, more valuable items stand in for love and affection. Barnes wants us to linger on this dynamic, to make us linger in this uncomfortable situation.
If this is so irrealistic, then why do I have so much empathy for this main character? Why have I questioned my own relationships with my family?
Metaphors aren't just a neat trick employed by the writer but a way for our minds to re-imagine the world around us, to see it in a new and sometimes terrible way. To grapple with the limits of our world.
Prompt:
Start a story by thingifying the antagonist. It might be easier to stick with a family dynamic, with a son and father, daughter-mother. How will you thingify the antagonistic character?
What object, concept, or thing can you make them into? How does this thingifying put pressure on the narrator/main character to act? How do they behave differently than they would if the antagonist was a regular human character?
How can you use concrete and sensory details to show/reveal the thingified character? What details will give this story and the thingified character a sense of perfectly chosen words, phrases, and details that fit the theme of the object?
Remember that comparisons are key in this style of story!
How do these comparisons agree or fight archetypes and stereotypes?
How can you create tension and escalation? Really let go and dig into the irrealism of this character and thingification!
Flash I’ve Enjoyed:
“Sister” by Eliot Li
“Tonight is the Night I Break Jimmy Taylor’s Poor, Silly Heart” by Francine Witte
“ON THE WAY TO CAMP” by JOY GUO
“WHAT REMAINS” by DW McKINNEY
“After the Wal-Mart Closes in Your Hometown” by Megan Pillow
Try This At Home:
What’s the most valuable thing you own? What kind of value does it have? If a character owned this item/thing, what would it reveal about their character? What would it reveal about a character who gives away this valuable thing? How could this valuable thing become a metaphor in a story? What meaning does it have beyond its tangible existence?
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Great insights!
Love this, Tommy. I teach extended metaphor on one of my courses and it's great to read your view on how to use this in flash as well as your close reading of Amy's wonderful piece.