Row Boats of Rhetoric

Strombeek and Louie have finally made the switch over to their new beds, or rowboats, as we call them.
Since when the cats curl up in them they look like they're adrift on a vast sea of whiteness.

This would be a metaphor, or a type of trope. A trope is a variation on the way we expect an idea to be expressed, as opposed to a scheme, which is a variation on the arrangement of words.

The cats appear apathetically interested in this lesson on rhetorical figures. (That's an oxymoron!)

Or maybe I just mean to say that they're interested...

But that would be irony.

Someone, like Abraham Lincoln, might ask: (prosopopoeia, inventing an imagined speaker) Are the beds comfortable? 

Louie: They're not uncomfortable. (litote, an understatement.)

Unless it was a rhetorical question, and then he wouldn't say anything.

Without their boats the cats would be "...a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors..." which is both synecdoche (part for whole, claws = crabs) and a quote from T.S. Eliot.

Strombeek is like, huh? I just came, I saw, I jumped in the row boat. (Anaphora, repetition at the beginning of each phrase.)

But now the cats have really had enough.

And Strombeek rows her boat to sleep. Which I think is paraprosdokian because it's not what you expect to end that phrase. You might expect that Strombeek would row her boat ashore. (singing) Strombeek row your boat ashore!

Or maybe you would expect that to be Michael, but paraprosdokian can only come at the end or it isn't really a surprise.

Perhaps, instead, we could say she drifts off to sleep, which is an idiom.