Metaphor: The Dustbin
Woolf muses on the subject of patriarchy, which she describes as the masculine perspective governing all of society. Already, World War I has made the conventional wisdom of the patriarchy “half a phantom,” which she hopes soon will be “laughed into the dustbin”—a metaphor for the manner in which outmoded systems of thought eventually are exposed as laughably empty.
Metaphor: Nature's Game
Twice Woolf makes specific reference to “nature’s game,” which serves as a metaphor for self-preservation. But nature, in this sense, is also a metaphor for those things that are not natural, but which seem to be natural through widespread acceptance of conventional thought—a kind of epistemic "game" that masks the truth of the world from people.
Simile: Life as a Wild Ride in the Tube
Woolf constructs an elaborate simile that ruminates on existential dread about the meaningless of life in the face of a disinterested God. Life, the narrator imagines, is akin to “being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour–landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked!”
Simile: Ants as Stream of Consciousness
Throughout the story, the narrator’s thought processes flit from one idea to another in a demonstration of Woolf’s use of the stream-of-consciousness technique. She even expresses an awareness of this at one point in a simile comparing the cognitive process to the labor of swarming ants: "How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it.”
