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Chapter 1
The light was frozen, dead, a ghost.
The narrator uses a metaphor to compare the light inside the room at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center to a ghost, cold and unfeeling, which shows that the atmosphere in the building is lifeless and free of emotion.
Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did [the light] borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables.
In contrast to the metaphor which immediately precedes it, in this simile the narrator compares the light reflected on the yellow barrels of the microscopes to butter, suggesting warmth and richness.
The spidery steel-work of gallery above gallery faded away in all directions in the dark.
In this metaphor, the narrator compares the configuration of the galleries of the Embryo Store to spider webs because they reach out in many directions.
Chapter 2
Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.
In this simile, the narrator compares the conditioning technique used on infants, which completely obliterates their underlying thoughts and responses, to sealing wax that completely covers the surface of a rock.
Chapter 4
He started the engines and threw the helicopter screws into gear. The machine shot vertically into the air. Henry accelerated; the humming of the propeller shrilled from hornet to wasp, from wasp to mosquito, . . . Out of one of them suddenly dropped a small scarlet insect, buzzing as it fell. “There’s the Red Rocket,” said Henry, “Just come from New York.” . . . He took his foot off the accelerator. The humming of the screws overhead dropped an octave and a half, back through wasp and hornet to bumble bee, to cockchafer, to stag-beetle.
In this metaphor, Henry is piloting his helicopter on a date with Lenina, and the narrator compares the sounds of the helicopter engines as they accelerate and then decelerate to a series of insect sounds.
Chapter 6
He was a mine of irrelevant information and unasked-for good advice.
In this metaphor, the narrator means that the Warden of the Reservation has as much unimportant information and unwelcome advice in his brain as a deep mine has gold or another precious metal.
Chapter 7
The mesa was like a ship becalmed in a strait of lion-colored dust.
The mesa is a high, flat, rocky area that rises from the tan-colored dry dirt of the narrow valley floor; in this simile, the narrator says that it looks like a ship that sits high in calm waters, as both are long, narrow, and unmoving.
Chapter 10
The hands of all the four thousand electric clocks in all the Bloomsbury Centre's four thousand rooms marked twenty-seven minutes past two. "This hive of industry," as the Director was fond of calling it, was in the full buzz of work. Every one was busy, everything in ordered motion.
In this metaphor, the narrator compares the efficiency on display in the Bloomsbury Centre’s workrooms to that of a beehive, and further extends the metaphor by using the word “buzz” to describe the sound of the work.
Chapter 14
Propped up on pillows, she was watching the Semi-finals of the South American Riemann-Surface Tennis Championship, which were being played in silent and diminished reproduction on the screen of the television box at the foot of the bed. Hither and thither across their square of illuminated glass the little figures noiselessly darted, like fish in an aquarium—the silent but agitated inhabitants of another world.
In this simile, on the television screen in Linda’s hospital room, the tennis players move around the court in the same way fish constantly and restlessly move back and forth in an aquarium.
And long evenings by the fire or, in summer time, on the roof of the little house, when she told him those stories about the Other Place, outside the Reservation: that beautiful, beautiful Other Place, whose memory, as of a heaven, a paradise of goodness and loveliness, he still kept whole and intact, undefiled by contact with the reality of this real London, these actual civilized men and women.
John sits with Linda in her hospital room, thinking of when he was young and her descriptions of London made it sound like heaven or paradise. In this simile, John shows that he still thinks of the place in his memory as heaven, although the real London is quite different.
