ABSTRACT
In the fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards! (1989) there is a character called Carrot. Despite being self-evidently human, he has been brought up as a dwarf, despite being six foot five, and is understandably confused as to his nature. He joins the City Watch, and writes home to his mother:
In a way this returns us to older arguments mentioned above about the role of metaphor as decorative or constitutive; but the point here is that in Pratchett’s fantasy realm of Discworld the dwarves themselves are a metaphor, not for the first time in literary and folk traditions, for a certain literality. Because of this accident of upbringing, or so we are led to suppose, Carrot does not have an innate understanding of metaphor; it
seems to him to be a peculiar habit, and it takes him a great deal of effort to get his mind round it.
