The Magic Mountain: Dramatic Irony 1 key example

The narrator uses several similes in a passage in which Hans discovers that he finds that he no longer enjoys the taste of his favorite cigars while sitting in Joachim’s room at the sanatorium: 

The corridor floor with its coconut runners undulated gently under his feet, but he found it was not all that unpleasant a sensation. He sat down in Joachim’s large flowered armchair—there was a chair like that in every room—and lit a Maria Mancini. It tasted like paste, like coal, like anything except what it should; nevertheless he continued to smoke it as he watched Joachim get ready for his rest cure, slipping into his tuniclike house jacket, putting an old overcoat on over that, and then taking the nightstand lamp and his Russian grammar with him out to the balcony [...] 

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