What metaphors are used in Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge?

The most calculating, cynical, and opportunistic of individuals, Jones is all about the subject of survival, in a novel, which turns out to be, in the end, very much about survival. He engenders the least amount of sympathy, as his life and his motives are about, to and for himself. He appears in the story first as the duck-boy, whom Myrtle observes returning a stolen duck to a poor woman in Washington Square. This turns out to be a ruse, a street trick, and is a neatly packaged metaphor for Jones's unsavory personal character.