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“The Use of Force” makes sparing use of figurative language. The narrator does not often use figurative language to describe and compare. For example, he says almost nothing of the house and kitchen that are the story’s setting, and his descriptions of the parents are minimal: the father is a “big man,” the mother is “very clean.” Readers know nothing at all, through figurative description, of the doctor.
But the exception to this generally straightforward style of description is the child, whom the doctor describes by using simile, metaphor, and hyperbole. In particular, the doctor compares the child to animals. Even while ill, she is “as strong as a heifer,” and he reports that her “cold, steady” gaze is “fairly eating me up.” She regards him as a wary animal observes prey or a predator, and when he first approaches her, she acts instinctively. Specifically, the child makes a “catlike” lunge to “claw” at the doctor’s eyes. In a nice touch, it is his glasses—artificial aids that only humans wear—that protect him from her sudden attack. After the doctor’s first attempt to open the child’s mouth, she begins to give “wild hysterical shrieks,” leading the doctor to comment on her “idiocy” rather than to see her as rising to “magnificent heights” in her attempt to protect herself. And as the child dissolves into fury and hysteria, the calm professional who arrived at the home minutes ago is more and more driven by “blind fury” and a “longing for muscular release” and less and less by rational decision-making capacities. It is as if each character brings out the irrational, instinct-driven animal in the other.
