A barrage of Greek
When the narrator picks up the phone to talk to his mother, a “barrage of Greek” hits him, which illustrates the hostile content of his mother’s utterances (after all, he does not visit her as often as she would like him to) and his inability to defend himself due to his hangover.
A deep cavern inside Ari
After smoking a joint, the narrator feels a “stoned hunger that’s like a deep cavern inside” him. This simile illustrates that he is craving for a large amount of food. Interestingly, the cavern is filled with food that he gets from friends and family, as he spends most of his money on drugs.
Ari's dances
Ari metaphorically compares sexual acts to a dance, where one person leads and the other one follows; both participants know the steps and do not need to talk: “A defiant dance, for I am a wog myself, and I have to force myself to my knees before another wog.” Indeed, most of Ari’s quickies in public are finished without exchanging any words.
Suburbs like Disneyland
Ari compares the suburbs in the East to Disneyland, which emphasizes his thinking that it lacks individualism because it is just a copy of American life. He detests it so much that he also compares it to the worst place imaginable by calling it “suburban hell.”
Sewers
Ari analyzes, “I am sliding towards the sewer, I’m not even struggling against the flow. I can smell the pungent aroma of shit, but I’m still breathing.” After capitalism has lead to social classes struggling with other social classes, and even turning migrants against migrants, Ari finds himself stuck in an underclass, which is represented by the image of the sewer being filled with people rejected by society: “They don’t need factories any more, they have elegantly-sculptured machines powered by microchips. They don’t need labour any more. Not now, now that they have the Internet. Nowhere to run, like the song. The sewers keep filling up, they are fucking overflowing and the refuse is choking up the atmosphere. From Singapore to Beijing, from Rio to Johannesburg.”
