This article discusses the extended figurative inventory to be detected in Heine's prose and addresses its narrative function both through a close reading and through a delineation of the frameworks in which it can be situated. Extensive usage of tropes like metaphor and metonymy tends to be seen as either a strong signal of interpretative authority or as an inherent aspect of the reader's activity of reception. The figurative network can also be seen, however, as an indicator of a certain hermeneutic openness, prefiguring and requiring the reader to reflect the process of metadiscursive denomination. In Heine's Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand, the prominent narrator takes up a number of common tropes denoting polemic communicative procedures ('stigmatising', 'executing', 'digesting', 'slaughtering' one's opponent). Those alienating appellations are filtered through a sequence of metonymic operations that relates their seemingly inherently persuasive effect to situations of reciprocity and cooperation. The analysis tests the assumption that Heine's prose is digressive, amorphous, eclectic, and witty at best. This widespread impression is refuted by pointing out the overt rhetoricity of the text, which constitutes a peculiar form of comment on the performance of the narration.