“like the hum of a plane speeding through a dense cloud”
The comparison to a plane in this simile is stimulated by the sound a car makes on wet pavement when heard from inside a sewer. The man of the title is literally living underground and shortly after his initial escape from police down a manhole in the street, this is his first encounter with the strangeness of a familiar sound aboveground being transformed into something unexpected belowground.
“like the antennae of an insect”
Hearing is not the only sense which is affected by the strange sense of the unfamiliar in the circumstances of being forced underground. It is the man’s fingers which “toyed in space” like antennae. The simile is surprisingly apt because it occurs at the end of a paragraph in which he is forced to use touch in concert with sight to navigate through the darkness below. The metaphor is apt since he must use his fingers much like an insect uses an antenna.
“these people were children, sleeping in their living, awake in their dying”
These metaphorical children are actually people of all ages staring up at a movie screen. The darkness led him to an exit door inside the theater and from there to an elevated position in the reserved section. The man descended into the darkness and his journey is leading him to light; the illumination of secret knowledge. Having learned things he never knew, he is literally and metaphorically looking down on the populace confusing the flickering images on the screen with actual illumination.
“He felt that someone had slipped up on him from behind and was stripping off his clothes”
This feeling arrives when the man has found a way into a store aboveground and sees a newspaper for the first time since he escaped from the police into the sewer. The headline blares forth that a manhunt is being conducted for him on the false charge to which he was coerced to confess: murder. This news comes at a point when the man found benefits to living underground impossible had he stayed above and the stripping of his clothes is really a metaphor within a metaphor. The fear is stripping him of all his newfound optimism.
“the serious toys of the men who lived in the dead world of sunshine and rain”
The serious toys are a typewriter, cleaver, radio, and everything else the man underground has stolen in the name of survival. Having been found guilty in the world above and condemned by their own lack of honesty and conscience to live among the rats in the sewers, his views toward traditional morality and conventional living have undergone the transformation of the man who comes to see the inherent unfairness of that world.
