Suddenly, the theater became silent. Just like the breathless spectators.
I'm very much interested in how this rhetorical device would be classified.
At first, "the theater" is a totum pro parte for the spectators. However, by later mentioning "the breathless spectators" as if talking about another entity, the literary device is dismantled, as it were. I'm interested in this dismantling, and if it has a name.
I came across two candidate solutions, but they do not quite seem to fit. A paraprosdokian does not necessarily pertain to a literary device in the first part of the sentence, and a pataphor goes on to strengthen rather than weaken the previous metaphor. My personal best guess would be a subversive metonym, although I find some usage of this term for different cases of metonymy.
Does anybody here perchance have knowledge of a name for such a figure of speech?