Metaphor: detective
“Because critics are meaning detectives, a rhetorical criticism is an exercise in showing the influences exerted by signs through their meanings”
Brummett, Barry. 1991. In Dimensions of Popular Culture. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Chapter 3
Metaphor: spy
“The beauty of his continuing canon is that his scrutiny of spies’ lives is always a metaphor for humanity’s broader existential predicaments.”
- Lars Ole Sauerberg (1984: 65) suggests that “Le Carré’s work may be read as a gradual approach to moral allegory: the removal of the political issues from a concrete to a spiritual dimension in which Smiley and his adversaries represent fundamental forces in the human mind.”
George Smiley, the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy protagonist, is an example of this persistent metaphor.
Rhetoric of Detective 