Conceptual Metaphor and Literary Discourse: A Study of the Implicit Metaphor in Somerset Maugham's Rain

This paper looks into the implicit conceptual metaphor in the short story Rain by Somerset Maugham from a cognitive-functional perspective.The word "rain",with its unusual frequency of occurrence and used in a less common clause structure in the discourse,is obviously foregrounded.But rain is not what the story is about,it is about the protagonist,a missionary,Davidson by name and his relationship with a woman named Thompson.Rain is used symbolically as the source domain,but where is the target domain? The recurrence of "the rain",which forms a metaphoric chain,moves the narrative through its entire structure,beginning with Orientation,through 11 phases in Complication Actions until it reaches Resolution,which takes the form of Davidson's suicide.The ending comes as a surprise to the reader and forces him to look back and re-contextualize the story on the basis of a series of counter-expectancies and linguistic expressions so that he finds the relationship between Davidson and Thompson was not one between a preacher and a sinner,but one between a man and a woman.Linguistic analysis and cognitive analysis bring to light the fact that what made Davidson behave the way he did was not only his religious fanaticism but,more decisively,also his inner urge or desire,which turns out to be the target domain.The fascinating role metaphor and metonymy play in the unfolding of discourse makes it possible to establish the cross-domain mapping of knowledge about rain onto knowledge about desire,so the dominant conceptual metaphor,Desire Is Rain,finally takes shape.This is how the discourse realizes the conceptual metaphor.As the metaphor is implicit,it takes a lot of inferencing to see how the discourse realizes it as it unfolds,and how the metaphor shapes the meaning of the discourse as it gradually emerges.The target domain is implied in order to make the story stylistically unique and heighten the cognitive impact of the short story.