Parenting
The wistful melancholy of a parent with children grown is touched upon through imagery. The narrator conveys the conception of the parent as just a symbolic manifestation of the individual human inside through familiar images of child-rearing:
“Memories particularly of when they weren’t being what parents are nine-tenths of the time, the taskmasters, the examples, the moral authorities, the nags of pick-that-up and you’re-going-to-be-late, keepers of the diary of her duties and routines, memories, rather, of when they found one another afresh, beyond the tensions between parental mastery and inept childish uncertainty, of those moments of respite in a family’s life when they could reach one another in calm.”
Looting as Capitalism
Looting that occurs during chaotic rioting is often situated within the ideological lens of socialism: redistributing wealth. Roth uses imagery to paint a different portrait. A corrosive picture of looting as the definition of American economic ideology:
“stealing sofas, cribs, kitchen tables, stealing washers and dryers and ovens—stealing not in the shadows but out in the open. Their strength is tremendous, their teamwork is flawless. The shattering of glass windows is thrilling. The not paying for things is intoxicating. The American appetite for ownership is dazzling to behold. This is shoplifting. Everything free that everyone craves, a wonton free-for-all free of charge, everyone uncontrollable with thinking, Here it is! Let it come!”
Make America THIS Again
The whole idea of making America great again—is rooted in the nostalgic gloss of America in the years following the victory of World War II. So much was going right and good that it is easy to overlook in retrospect—especially since it was easily overlooked at the time it was happening—all the things going on America that weren’t so great for so many people. The following imagery is the centerpiece of the call to make it so again—but without the heavy financial burden it required to get there the first time around:
“Let's remember the energy. Americans were governing not only themselves but some two hundred million people in Italy, Austria, Germany, and Japan. The war-crimes trials were cleansing the earth of its devils once and for all. Atomic power was ours alone. Rationing was ending, price controls were being lifted; in an explosion of self-assertion, auto workers, coal workers, transit workers, maritime workers, steel workers—laborers by the millions demanded more and went on strike for it.”
Setting
It is not just some of the more abstract elements of literature to which Roth puts his talent for imagery. One of the most dependable uses for it in fiction is to do what the movies can do much easier: create a concrete vivid setting. At times, the prose almost seems like a throwback to the imagery-rich novels of the 19th century which required writers to work extra-hard to help readers visualize things they had never actually seen:
“On the east side of the street, the dark old factories—Civil War factories, foundries, brassworks, heavy-industrial plants blackened from the chimneys pumping smoke for a hundred years—were windowless now, the sunlight sealed out with brick and mortar, their exits and entrances plugged with cinderblock. These were the factories where people had lost fingers and arms and got their feet crushed and their faces scalded, where children once labored in the heat and the cold, the nineteenth-century factories that churned up people and churned out goods and now were unpierceable, airtight tombs.”
