Metaphor and Narrative

The reason for developing the analysis of metaphor in the direction is to concentrate upon the issues relating to the poetic mode of language as the linguistic mediation for the grounding and affirming of presence – the mode of language which may be understood as the ontological expression of being-in-the-world. In the light of Ferdinand de Saussure’s definition of the arbitrary nature of linguistic meaning, particularly his view of symbol, and the central role played by the symbolic characteristic of metaphor, it is important to appreciate the difference between these contrasting theories in which sound is fundamental to both. The spoken word gives expression to an imaginative participation in the world of the narrative. It is an expression of sound patterns integrally related to a state of being that is actively disturbed by the ontological reverberations of an imaginative appropriation of the world of the narrative.