The simile of lascivious scissors
The narrator had dreams of New York, and he related his finances to the stories he heard from his friends about the city. In his imaginations, the narrator thought that New York was the brightest city. The narrator compares the people and cab drivers of New York to a girl with a gleaming girl whose legs look like lascivious scissors. The author writes, “I imagined a clean, hard, bright city where towers reared to the sky in a paradigm of technological aspiration and all would be peopled by loquacious cab-drivers, black but beaming chambermaids and a special kind of crisp-edged girl with apple crunching incisors and long, gleaming legs like lascivious scissors – the shadowless inhabitants of a finite and succinct city where the ghosts who haunt the cities of Europe could have found no cobweb corners to roost in.”
The simile of somnambulists
The narrator compares the guests' pajamas that were scattered everywhere to somnambulists when saying, “The lobby filled with firemen, policemen and disaster-loving night-walkers who drifted in through the glass doors while the roused guests in their pajamas wandered about like somnambulists, wringing their hands.” All these happened on the first morning of the narrator in New York. The hotel he had slept in caught fire and everybody ran for safety.
The Irony of Love
The narrator compares the old soldier's veined eyeballs to marble when he says, “His protuberant eyeballs were veined with red like certain kinds of rare marble.” Both the narrator and the soldier were conversing about the city’s evil people who think they are immortal. As the older man narrated about the wrong people, he became agitated and sad, which caused the veins of his eyeballs to marble.
The simile of the harmonious cities of the Chinese Empire
The narrator compares New York with the harmonious cities of China when he says, “Built on a grid-like the harmonious cities of the Chinese Empire, planned, like those cities, in strict accord with the dictates of a doctrine of reason, the streets had been given numbers and not names out of respect for pure function, had been designed in clean, abstract lines, discrete blocks, geometric intersections, to avoid just those vile repositories of the past, sewers of history, that poison the lives of European cities.“ The description and comparison of New York City to the Chinese empire paints a vivid picture of its design's uniqueness.
The simile of a pasha
The protagonist recalls his happy moments with Leila. For instance, he recounts how he watched Leila dress herself every evening before going to her job in the theaters and restaurants. The protagonist never visited Leila's place of work. Instead, he remained home and lied bed. He compares his lying on bed to a pasha when he says, “I would lie on her bed like a pasha, smoking, watching, in her cracked mirror, the transformation of the grubby little bud who slumbered all day in her filth; she was a night-blooming flower.”
