What metaphors are used in A Silver Dish by Saul Bellow?

Aging is a metaphor in the narrative. Since most of this story takes place in retrospect when Woody Selbst is a young man, it may be difficult for readers to bear in mind that he is sixty years old, well past the prime of life. Throughout the story he is overshadowed by his father. As a young man, his struggle to establish an independent identity fails, as his father ruins his chance to become a scholar and is responsible for his being thrown out of school. According to Morris Selbst, seminary did not offer Woody a true calling anyway. In adulthood, Woody has taken financial responsibilities of his family for years, but upon his father's death he awakens to a new awareness of the limits of life. Noting, at his father's hospital, the general decrepitude of his mother and his father's mistress, he muses, "everybody had lived by the body, but the body was giving out."