In Chapter 15, Dantès reflects on his former life that he enjoyed before being stripped of his humanity and heartlessly imprisoned by Villefort's machinations against him. He uses a potent combination of personification, simile, and metaphor as he ruminates on his seafaring days as a young sailor:

‘Sometimes,’ he thought at such moments, ‘in my distant voyages, when I was still a man—and when that man, free and powerful, gave orders to others that they carried out—I used to see the sky open, the sea tremble and groan, a storm brewing in some part of the sky and thrashing the horizon with its wings like a giant eagle; then I would feel that my vessel was nothing but a useless refuge, itself shaking and shuddering, as light as a feather in the hand of a giant.'

In Dantès's memory, the sky becomes human through personification as it trembles and groans, the storm that brews within the sky transforms into an eagle through simile, and the boat becomes a feather in the hand of a giant through metaphor. In this former life, Dantès felt small—helpless, utterly beholden to the forces that brewed around him, incapable of self-determination. As he transforms into the Count, he will learn to bend the world to his will and become a force of nature in his own right.