Metaphor

Saying one thing through another, without a word of comparison: instead of saying that something is like another thing, one says that it is. The image transfers to the subject the qualities of the thing it has been identified with.

In Notes from Underground

There, in his disgusting, stinking underground, our offended, beaten, and mocked mouse plunges at once into a cold, venomous, and above all eternal rage.

The offended man is called a «mouse», who slips into the «little crack» and lives in the «underground». The image of the small creature that hides says, without any explicit comparison, how he sees himself before others.

Part One: The Underground, the underground man

Of course I won't break through a wall like that with my forehead, if I really lack the strength to break through, but I also won't resign myself to it just because I have a stone wall before me and my strength was not enough.

Part One: The Underground, the underground man

he will be convinced that he is a man, and not a piano key!

Part One: The Underground, the underground man

and twice two is four is no longer life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death.

Part One: The Underground, the underground man

You believe in a crystal edifice, eternally unshakable, that is, one in which one could not even stick one's tongue out on the sly, nor make a fig in one's pocket.

Part One: The Underground, the underground man

that I am a fly before all this world, a nasty, useless fly, more intelligent, more developed, and more noble than all, that goes without saying, but a fly that gives way to everyone the whole time, humiliated by all and insulted by all.

Part Two: Apropos of Wet Snow, the underground man

We are stillborn, and it has been a long time since we were born of living parents, and this pleases us more and more. We are getting the taste for it. Before long we will come up with being born of an idea.

Part Two: Apropos of Wet Snow, the underground man