“Metropolitan Splendour” - “The Street of Crocodiles”
The sumptuousness of metropolitanism is rampant: “ one could see the cheap jerry-built houses with grotesque facades, covered with a monstrous stucco of cracked plaster. The Old suburban houses had large hastily constructed portals grafted onto them which only on close inspections revealed themselves as miserable imitations of metropolitan splendour.” Although the district has not copiously transmuted into an unreserved, elegant metropolitan, the houses bid a clue of metropolitanism. The district is bidding to be an idyllic metropolitan area through the facades that imitate a real metropolitan eminence. Still, the district has not been revamped wholly. Its ancient status renders it a low class zone relative to contemporary metropolitan regions.
“Glass Panes” - “The Street of Crocodiles”
The ‘glass panes’ reflect the district’s dingy tackiness: “Dull, dirty and faulty glass panes in which dark pictures of the street were wavily reflected, the badly planed wood of the doors.” Based on the standing of the panes, it can be construed that the district is unquestionably inferior. The imperfectness suggests that the panes are problematic; besides, the panes’ filthiness indicate the district’s second-rate ranking.
Cockroaches - “Cockroaches”
The cockroaches are illustrative of mental volatility: “Who could say whether he continued to live in some crack in the floor, whether he ran through the rooms at night absorbed in cockroachy affairs, or whether perhaps he was one of those dead insects which Adela found every morning lying on their backs with their legs in the air and which she swept up into a dustpan to burn later with disgust?” The narrator’s father’s bearings are tantamount to that of a representative cockroach; his proclivity for these stances suggests that he was gripped with being a cockroach, which is clear indicator of disparaging mental instability.
