Mr. Tichota
The tricky thing about a simile that uses a familiar element of pop culture as the point of comparison is that those elements have a tendency to eventually become less familiar. On the other hand, anyone who can immediately conjure the image to which this comparison refers will see Mr. Tichota pretty clearly:
“Everything about him was so fat, like the ad for Michelin tires, but Mr. Tichota, to whom the body belonged, seemed full of good spirits and he whizzed back and forth through the foyer.”
Sex
The narrator is a bit obsessed with sex. And naked women. And thinking back to sex with naked women. The result is a healthy amount of descriptive prose bringing to life the act of sexual congress; much of it metaphorical in content:
“Our naked bodies twined together and everything seemed liquid, as though we were snails, our moist bodies oozing out of our shells and into each other's embrace”
Literary Ambitions
The narrator harbors ambitions of being a writer. It is a testament to his ambition and pursuit that the description of his writing ambition produces one of the most lyrical metaphorical passages in the text:
“I longed to write everything down just as it was, so others could read it and from what I said to myself paint all the pictures that had been strung like beads, like a rosary, on the long thread of my life”
The Tuxedo Tailor
The narrator is desperate for a tuxedo and lucks across not just a tailor, but an artist. A tux-design savant whose talents extend to adornment of his shop which the narrator further transforms into an aesthetic exhibition through his talent for figurative language:
“Up near the ceiling hung the torsos of generals and regimental commanders and famous actors…draft from an open window made the torsos move about like little fleecy clouds in an autumn wind. A thin thread bearing a name tag dangled down from every torso, and the tags danced gaily in the breeze, like fish on a line.”
Pursuing the Double Metaphor
The narrator’s talent for figurative imagery is especially intensified when he pursues the idea of combining two different metaphors to communicate the same action or emotion. A particularly good example—but far from the only one—is illustrated here:
“The sun was shining, but now it seemed to turn dark, and I felt like a lamp whose wick the headwaiter had turned down, or an inflated tire whose valve he had loosened. I could hear the air hissing out of me as I walked along, and I felt that I was no longer lighting my own way”
