Meaning of a Simile
From "The Letter on the Kitchen Table"
When my mother left the letter on the kitchen table, she had not bothered to seal it. The envelope sat propped against the salt shaker, my name written in her looping, deliberate hand, the flap loose as an open hand offering nothing in particular.
I did not read it for three days. I told myself I was being patient, but the truth was that I already knew what it said, or thought I did, and I was not ready to be told. The letter waited. The salt shaker waited. The morning light moved across the kitchen and back without comment.
On the third evening I sat down with a glass of water and opened it. The handwriting was hers, but the voice was younger than the woman I had known. She had been my age when she wrote it, I realized — twenty-four, the year before I was born. She had kept the letter for thirty years and then, in her last week, had set it on the table for me as if it were a saucer of milk for a stray cat.
Question
Answer choices
- the mother considered the narrator unreliable.
- the kitchen table was a place for animals.
- the mother distrusted house pets.
- the offering was tentative and might be ignored.
D Correct answer: D) the offering was tentative and might be ignored.
A saucer of milk for a stray cat is an offering with no expectation that it will be received — the cat may or may not come. The simile suggests the mother was making a tentative offering of the letter, not insisting it be read.
On the ACT, reading questions reward returning to the passage and verifying. The wrong answers are written to sound plausible from memory, but they distort one specific phrase from the passage. Re-reading the relevant lines is what catches the distortion.
Predicting an answer in your own words before looking at the choices, then matching the prediction to the closest option, is the single most reliable technique on ACT Reading. Choosing from the choices first lets the test's wrong-answer writers anchor your judgment.
The underlying rule
Similes carry connotation, not just comparison. Ask what feeling the comparison creates, not what it literally describes.
Why each wrong answer is wrong
- A) the mother considered the narrator unreliable.: This option distorts a specific phrase from the passage or applies a true statement that does not actually answer the question being asked.
- B) the kitchen table was a place for animals.: This option distorts a specific phrase from the passage or applies a true statement that does not actually answer the question being asked.
- C) the mother distrusted house pets.: This option distorts a specific phrase from the passage or applies a true statement that does not actually answer the question being asked.
Study tip
For figurative-language questions, identify the emotional tone of the comparison and match the answer choice that captures that tone.
More Hard Prose Fiction
- Narrator's Initial ReactionFrom "The Letter on the Kitchen Table" — Narrator's Initial Reaction
- Meaning of a SimileFrom "The Letter on the Kitchen Table" — Meaning of a Simile
- Narrator's Initial ReactionFrom "The Letter on the Kitchen Table" — Narrator's Initial Reaction
- Meaning of a SimileFrom "The Letter on the Kitchen Table" — Meaning of a Simile
- Narrator's Initial ReactionFrom "The Letter on the Kitchen Table" — Narrator's Initial Reaction