For instance, in "Pastoralia," his satire of the modern workplace, George Saunders uses particularly mixed, clichéd, and long-winded metaphors in the missives the self-serving manager, Nordstrom, sends the protagonist:
Think of you and Janet as branches on a tree. While it's true that a branch sometimes needs to be hacked off and come floating down, so what, that is only one branch, it does not kill the tree, and sometimes one branch must die so that the others may live. And anyway, it only looks like death, because you are falsely looking at this through the lens of an individual limb or branch, when in fact you should be thinking in terms of the lens of what is the maximum good for the overall organism, or tree. When we chop one branch, we all become stronger! And that branch on the ground, looking up, has the pleasure of knowing that he or she made the tree better, which I hope Janet will do. Although knowing her? With her crappy attitude? Probably she will lie on the ground wailing and gnashing her leaves while saying swear words up at us. But who cares! She is gone. She is a goner. And we have you to thank. So thanks!Here, the manager starts with the kind of clichéd metaphor that could easily come out of a management handbook: the tree is the organization and the workers are the branches. But the unedited metaphor goes on and on, becoming more muddled, until the "branch" called Janet is "gnashing her leaves." (One reviewer commented that Saunders' characters talk as though they'd "read The Elements of Styles and decided to ignore as many of the important suggestions as possible.") The effect is funny, and it tells us a lot about the manager. He uses words to try and obscure his real meanings, and he doesn't have the intelligence or the discipline to do even that well. So the bad metaphors reveal the character of the manager and embody the absurdity of the protagonist's situation.
Something we can learn from and use? Definitely, but only if the situation calls for it, and only if it's done skillfully. Otherwise, of course, stick with metaphors that work.