What metaphors are used in Redemption by John Gardner?

Gardner's fiction is not confessional, nor does it represent a constant and obsessive picking of the scab over the wound caused by his brother's death; that would in the end have rendered his novels and stories trivial. What saves his fiction from triviality (in the sense of it being overly private) is the fact that in his personal traumas Gardner has discovered a paradigm, or a metaphor, for what he regards as the central illness of recent Western culture: the inclination to keep peering into the abyss, "counting skulls," losing oneself in a fashionable attraction toward despair.