Saying one thing by means of 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 with which it has been identified.
In The Magic Mountain
the love that was oppressed was not dead, no; it lived, it continued, in the darkness, in the deepest secrecy, yearning for its fulfillment, it broke the magic circle of chastity and reemerged, though in a metamorphosed form, most difficult to recognize [...] In the form of illness. The symptom of illness is nothing but the disguised manifestation of love's power; and every illness is merely love transformed
Krokowski calls chastity a "magic circle," as if it were a boundary of enchantment, and says that the repressed love "broke" out to return in the form of illness. The image turns repression into a spell and the symptom into the way out for what has been kept captive.
Chapter IV: The Sense of Time, Hippe and the Thermometer, Dr. Krokowski
And Hans Castorp saw what he should have expected, but what in reality is not for man to see, and what he would never have believed he could see: he cast a glance into his own tomb. [...] and for the first time in his life understood that he was destined to die.
Chapter V: Humaniora, the Analysis and Walpurgis Night, the narrator
a fever of matter that accompanied the process of incessant decomposition and reconstitution of albumen molecules [...]. It was neither matter nor spirit. It was something between the two, a phenomenon sustained by matter, just like the rainbow over the waterfall, and equal to the flame. [...] Illness was the licentious form of life.
the thunder we all know of rumbled, that deafening detonation of the sinister mixture of boredom and irritation long accumulated [...] and the thunder that, for us, however, makes the magic mountain explode and casts our sleeper, none too gently, before its gates.
Chapter VII: Peeperkorn, the Great Boredom and the Thunder, the narrator
Will love still emerge from this worldwide festival of death, and from the pernicious fever that inflames the sky of the rainy night?
Chapter VII: Peeperkorn, the Great Boredom and the Thunder, the narrator
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