The Brothers Karamazov

In a scene in which the General’s widow, the former guardian of Fyodor’s second wife, Sofya, arrives at Fyodor’s home to assume responsibility for his two younger children, the narrator uses a simile that compares Grigory to a “devoted slave”: 

Seeing at a glance that they were unwashed and in dirty shirts, she gave one more slap to Grigory himself and announced to him that she was taking both children home with her, then carried them outside just as they were [...], and took them to her own town. Grigory bore his slap like a devoted slave, without answering back, and while helping the old lady to her carriage, he bowed low and said imposingly that “God would reward her for the orphans.” “And you are a lout all the same!” the general’s widow shouted. 

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Describing Alexei’s claims that he can recall his mother, Sofya Ivanovna, despite her death when he was only four years old, the narrator employs various similes to explain the incomplete nature of early memories: 

Incidentally, I have already mentioned that although he lost his mother in his fourth year, he remembered her afterwards all his life, her face, her caresses, “as if she were standing alive before me.” Such memories can be remembered (everyone knows this) even from an earlier age, even from the age of two, but they only emerge throughout one’s life as specks of light, as it were, against the darkness, as a corner torn from a huge picture, which has all faded and disappeared except for that little corner.

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Dmitri, desperate to prevent Grushenka from accepting his father’s invitation, beats Grigory to gain access to Fyodor’s house and then beats his father before being pulled away by his brothers. After speaking with his father, who threatens Dmitri with legal action, and with Ivan, who responds ambivalently to his concerns, Alexei reflects anxiously upon the future of his family, using a simile and foreshadowing later events in the novel: 

One main, fateful, and insoluble question towered over everything like a mountain: how would it end between his father and his brother Dmitri with this terrible woman? Now he himself had been a witness. He himself had been there and had seen them face each other. However, only his brother Dmitri could turn out to be unhappy, completely and terribly unhappy: disaster undoubtedly lay in wait for him.

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Alexei uses two contrasting similes to describe the contradictory nature of Lise, the 14-year-old daughter of Madame Khokhlakov. As the two discuss their engagement, which was agreed upon hastily without consulting their families, the narrator states: 

“Ah, you don’t know it, but I, too, am a Karamazov! What matter if you laugh and joke, and at me, too? On the contrary, laugh—I’m so glad of it … But you laugh like a little girl, and inside you think like a martyr …” 
“A martyr? How so?”
 “Yes, Lise, your question just now: aren’t we contemptuous of that wretched man, dissecting his soul like that—that was a martyr’s question … you see, I can’t express it at all, but someone in whom such questions arise is capable of suffering. Sitting in your chair, you must already have thought a lot …”

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In his serious and frank discussion with Alexei on the topics of God and faith, Ivan uses a number of similes to describe his “childlike conviction” in “eternal harmony”: 

It’s not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God’s, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept. With one reservation: I have a childlike conviction that the sufferings will be healed and smoothed over, that the whole offensive comedy of human contradictions will disappear like a pitiful mirage, a vile concoction of man’s Euclidean mind, feeble and puny as an atom, and that ultimately, at the world’s finale, in the moment of eternal harmony, there will occur and be revealed something so precious that it will suffice for all hearts [...] 

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After his arrest as a suspect in the murder of his father, Dmitri’s pride is further bruised as he is subjected to the undignified processes of the law, including a thorough strip-search. Reflecting upon his situation, which he considers to be beneath his station as a man of good class, Dmitri describes the proceedings, in a simile, as being “like a dream”: 

He felt unbearably awkward: everyone else was dressed, and he was undressed, and—strangely—undressed, he himself seemed to feel guilty before them [...] “If everyone is undressed, it’s not shameful, but when only one is undressed and the others are all looking—it’s a disgrace!” flashed again and again through his mind. “It’s like a dream, I’ve dreamed of being disgraced like this.” But to take his socks off was even painful for him: they were not very clean, nor were his underclothes, and now everyone could see it.

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The narrator uses a simile that compares Mrs. Krasotkin, mother of Kolya, to a “rose” when describing Kolya’s change in attitude following a risky daredevil stunt: 

After the incident on the railway, he changed his behavior in this respect as well: he allowed himself no more hints, not even the remotest, and began to speak more respectfully of Dardanelov in his mother’s presence, which the sensitive Anna Fyodorovna understood at once with boundless gratitude in her heart, but at the same time, the slightest, most inadvertent mention of Dardanelov, even from some unaccustomed guest, if it was in Kolya’s presence, would make her blush all over with embarrassment, like a rose.

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