I wonder if someone could confirm my understanding of the grammar in the following sentence on p32 of the Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar:
Later the teacher gave the gourd he had taken from Seibei to an old janitor as if it was a filthy object.
I think it is taken from a children's story so it is supposed to be written with basic words but results in a difficult expression*.
My clumsy analysis of the section 汚れた物ででもあるかのように、捨てるように is
汚れた物で= "it is a dirty object and/but.."
でもあるか＝ "we still have it?!", でも="still" in the sense of extreme, か conveys surprise
(か)のように、＝ "as if", the particles indicate that the preceding expression describes the position of the teacher to the gourd ("It is dirty, and we still have it?!")
捨てるように = in order to throw away
[小使いにやってしまった = gave it to the janitor]
If I put this together I think we find the teacher:
"gave [the gourd] to the janitor, as if it was being thrown away, as if it was something still in our possession that was dirty[and therefore should be thrown out]"
Is this correct? Could we replace ででもあるかのように with として? If so, how much of the poetical nature of the original Japanese would be lost?
*It may just be me but I often found the "simple" explanations of grammatical expressions in the JLPT books that use this type of language harder than the expressions itself!