Please give some examples of metaphor, similie, and imagery in The Wednesday Wars by Gary Schmidt.

The Wednesday Wars by Gary Schmidt is
told from the perspective of a seventh-grade boy named Holling Hoodhood. Holling is
rather dramatic, as noted in the opening line of the
novel:

Of all
the kids in the seventh grade at Camillo Junior High, there was one kid that Mrs. Baker
hated with a heat whiter than the sun.
Me.

His vivid language
reflects his feelings throughout the novel, and he often expresses them through
figurative language (note the imagery of the white-hot sun in the line
above).

Imagery usually appeals to one or more of the
senses, and Holling gives us plenty of imagery throughout the novel. Other examples of
imagery include the following:

• "The chalk dust
  that didn’t get into my lungs flew and twisted with the breeze that curled against the
  first-floor classrooms, coating all the windows…." Note the use of sight, touch, smell,
  sound, and even taste in this example.


• Sycorax and
  Caliban "had hair the color of cardboard in splotches over parts of their bodies, but
  mostly they were just yellow and scabby skinned." If you find this description at all
  disgusting or creepy, Holling has done what he intended. He appeals primarily to sight
  and touch for this one.


• "So we sat in the half-dark, in
  our coats, in the cold." Imagine kids huddled in a classroom in the winter without any
  electricity, and this is how it might look and
  feel.

Metaphors are comparisons between two
things which serve to help the reader understand or feel something more clearly. Just
before the holidays at Camillo Junior High, teachers decorate their classroom doors with
all manner of things, and Holling describes them this
way:

The
windows on the classroom doors became crepe paper-stained
glass.

Holling uses a more
compelling metaphor when he describes how he felt when his baseball hero Mickey Mantle
proved to be rude and unkind. Holling says, "When gods die, they die hard." To him,
Mickey Mantle had been a kind of god, and it was a hard thing for Holling to accept that
his god was nothing more than a flawed human being.

Holling
also uses similes to draw his readers a picture of how he feels or what he sees. When
his entire class, even those he thought were his friends, threatens him relentlessly to
bring them cream puffs, Holling compares that to something in Shakespeare's
The Merchant of Venice:

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I remembered the death threats hanging over me
like Shylock’s knife hanging over Antonio’s
chest.

Holling is also moved
by beauty, and here he tries to express that:

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It was sort of a holy moment, and the light that
shone around them seemed to glow softly, like something you’d see in one of the stained
glass windows at St.
Andrew’s.

Figurative language
is an effective way to help the reader feel what the character is feeling and experience
what he is experiencing. Though he is only a seventh-grader, Holling is able to express
himself through figurative language throughout this novel.