Holes in literature and why they are important

In American Literature, we have recently been talking about the idea of metaphor, and how no metaphor encompasses the whole picture. I agree that there are always holes in a metaphor. However, I would like to extend this beyond that one figure. To do this, I am going to take a look at some of the texts we have read this year: Billy Budd, The Great Gatsby, and finally Maus to see where each respective figure falls short. In Billy Budd by Herman Melville, we discussed how the characters were more archetype than human. While this was mostly true, occasionally they would become more human. For instance, when Budd hit the sailor in the very beginning of the book. The second book we read this year, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, had east egg and west egg representative of the bourgeoisie and proletariat respectively. What pokes holes in this idea is the definition of the “proletariat” in west egg. While they did technically make their own fortunes by being actors and such, in today’s society it would be easy to classify actors as bourgeoisie due to the appearance that famous actors get paid more for their name than for their talent. In Maus by Art Spiegelman, holes are opened up in the metaphor of cats and mice when people are depicted wearing animal masks, and actual animals are brought into the story.

            So metaphors and other literary thing have holes, well so does Swiss cheese but we don’t seem to care all that much. Why are these holes in the literature so special? My answer to this is that these holes make the text worthwhile reading. If each text was comprised of a metaphor and no holes, all one would have to do is to say “the metaphor is _______” and thus put all of the meaning of the text in a single sentence, rendering the actual text useless. A text’s job is to explain the holes in the metaphor in such a way as to convey the story. In conclusion, texts contains holes everywhere and that is what makes them worthwhile.