Welcome to the Monkey House

As an extension of satire, irony helps to accentuate the points the author is trying to make. A large irony in the story is that the moralists do not believe in having sex for anything but procreation and say they do not believe in interfering with the creation of life in a chemical way, but they do not seem to have an issue with chemically extending life or ending it in the suicide parlors. This irony reveals that the government does not, in fact, have as much interest in protecting life as they do in preserving social order.

Another instance of irony is the over-sexualization of the virgin suicide hostesses. As bringers of death, they might have a more calming appearance, and it is unclear as to why they need to be virgins. By including these ironies, the audience can see the disharmony between what exists in this world and what might make sense.

The narrator uses simile in describing Billy’s cabin on the boat to show that the boat is perhaps not the environment the audience might be expecting: “It was about as voluptuous as a lower-middle-class dining room in Akron, Ohio, around 1910” (45). Even without context for what such a dining room might feature, the reader can imagine it, and it isn’t visually appealing. The contrast of the word “voluptuous,” which generally refers to a curvy and sensual woman, with the simile of the bland dining room in a bland household in a bygone, bland era also creates humor for the situation where Nancy is most certainly about to be raped.

A simile that helps the audience to connect with Nancy’s situation after the rape is: “Big as she was, like a double bass wedged onto that narrow shelf, she felt like a little thing” (47). By comparing Nancy’s actual size to her psychological size, the audience can feel empathy for Nancy’s struggles while also understanding that she has been reduced from a strong Amazonian woman to nearly nothing.

The ethical birth control pills are a metaphor for how humans often willingly give away their freedoms for something easier or something that might only seem to make sense. When Nancy’s pill wears off and her body wakes up, this is a metaphor for regaining the freedoms lost.

When Nancy’s ethical birth control is wearing off, the narrator uses metaphor to describe the sensation of bees and mosquitos, which connects the reader to a familiar feeling of their legs or arms waking up after lost circulation. This metaphor extends into another, since Nancy’s body waking up is a metaphor for a mind’s awakening after succumbing to either willful or involuntary ignorance.

Nancy refers to “the chemical clock of her body” (41) when she pinches herself to see if her legs are still asleep. A common term for women is reference to her biological clock, which indicates when a woman might feel ready to have children. Nancy’s chemical clock, on the other hand, would indicate when she is ready to feel the sensations that might allow her to want children. Additionally, the extinction of the birds and bees in the story is likely a metaphor for the extinction of sexual pleasure, as the birds and the bees are a common metaphor for sex.