QuakeBox Similes: Change and Persistence in Similes in Post-earthquake Narratives

We analyze the use of similes in the QuakeBox corpus, a unique longitudinal corpus of retold earthquake stories recorded seven years apart following the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake to investigate how the narration of extreme experiences changes over time. We distinguish between “distanced” similes that evoke a mediated or emotional experience and “direct” similes that describe a concrete or embodied experience. Linking these simile types to specific topics within the earthquake narratives, we analyze the source and targets used and examine whether this usage changes in retellings. We found the total number of similes used remained relatively consistent over time, as did the proportions of direct and distanced similes. Some source domains were prominent, notably war and movie/tv, but speakers often varied according to which specific simile they used, suggesting that it is particular functional characteristics of similes that persist over time rather than mappings. Building on prior work about similative scales of experience, we find that the direct and distanced simile types represent two distinct rhetorical strategies used to communicate the strangeness and intensity of a disaster and we highlight their distinctive characteristics.