The Confusion of a Marginal American: The Container Metaphorical Interpretation of Baldwin’s The Discovery of What It Means to Be American

This paper examines the metaphorical structure of Baldwin’s work The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American in the light of the theory of metaphors. It argues that the meaning of Baldwin’s article depends critically upon structural metaphors and ontological metaphors of people’s experiences. With the help of these conceptual metaphors, the author finds it is easier to find Baldwin’s contradiction, entanglement, introspection and disillusion which were described in the article. In the article, the author finds that Baldwin foregrounded his works with the preposition phrase “in ＋ place” in the whole article. The construct “in ＋ place” can be easily associated with container schema. This structural metaphor, together with other conceptual metaphors, is in fact a common knowledge for human beings.