“Then Later, His Ghost” is a short story by Sarah Hall about a post-apocalyptic future. In the story, the unnamed main character, presumably a teenage boy, is hunting for a copy of the play The Tempest by William Shakespeare to give to his apocalyptic companion, Helene, an English teacher who became pregnant due to rape. While the text never says what led to this apocalypse, it alludes that it was due to a changing climate or even nuclear war. Both topics are intrinsically related to energy consumption and production; therefore I thought it would be interesting to read the text in relation to energy. The story is very rich in imagery and descriptions of apocalyptic natural forces, but there are fewer metaphors and similes, making them more significant to analyze. I organized each metaphor by what emotion the main character was feeling, or what I interpreted he was feeling. I then organized the metaphors into five different feelings or thoughts: powerfulness, powerlessness, fear, blended relationships between the natural world and human world, and miscellaneous. 

This data visualization shows the complex relationship between power and the main character. The vast majority of the metaphors where the narrator felt powerful were intrinsic to an energy afterlife. For example, as the main character prepares to go outside into the apocalyptic wind he tapes on his clothing, and “when he was done he felt almost airtight, like some kind of diver” (Hall). This quote shows how energy afterlives, in this case, divers and tape, make the character feel powerful or safe. Even though petroculture is gone and the world is now very dangerous for humans, humans still feel safe by grasping the remnants of petroculture. One of the biggest things that stood out to me about my visualization was the inverse relationship between EA metaphors and non-EA metaphors when it came to the character feeling powerful or powerless. Energy afterlives make him feel powerful, and inversely, non-energy afterlife metaphors describe when he feels powerless. This data visualization illuminates how the character clings to energy afterlives to feel a sense of power or control and that his world without petroculture makes him feel powerless. 

Human society has crumbled in the text, so naturally, the line between the natural world and the human world has become almost insignificant. One way this is shown is by the similes in which the main character is compared to animals. When he is moving around outside he is “flattened out … like a lizard” or “crouched like an ape” (Hall). As the character is around very few people, his actions and mannerisms become animalistic, showing a blend between the natural and human worlds. The metaphors in the story show humans become animals, and also show how natural forces, such wind, take on human-like qualities. Without petroculture, humans go back to being of nature, instead of dominating nature and mitigating nature’s forces.

To create this visualization I read the story many times and marked every time I noticed a simile or metaphor being used. Afterward, I went back and determined whether the literary device was in some way connected to an energy afterlife, whether that be a material or object created by the industrial world, or not. I then organized the metaphors by emotion. At this point, I graphed the metaphors by emotion into a packed circle chart. I considered adding a temporal element such as whether the metaphor was referring to something before or after the apocalypse began or where the metaphor is located within the story. However, I found this overcomplicated the data and didn’t lead to any new results. A source of error for this project may be my categorization of metaphors into different emotions. My categorizations will always have some level of error since they were made by a reader of the story and not the author, but even so I believe they are accurate to the story and the main character. 

Bibliography

FEMA. "Operation Plumbbob." 1957. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FEMA_-_2720_-_Photograph_by_FEMA_News_Photo.jpg.

Hall, Sarah. “‘Then Later, His Ghost’: A Short Story by Sarah Hall.” New Statesman, 31 Jan. 2023, www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/01/then-later-his-ghost.