Personal appearance
The imagery of personal appearance is much more than the literal facts about a character's appearance. The concrete appearance is doubled by an abstract suffering that might be called "self-esteem." When Janine was overweight, she was easily controlled by her husband, but now she has a fire in her eyes. This is the same imagery backwards. We see that the imagery of her experience was so intense that by being overweight she believed lies about her nature. By losing weight, she realized she was wrong about herself.
Loyalty
There is a competition between two forms of loyalty in this novel. On the one hand, Janine experiences guilt when she cheats, but she still cheats. This is evidence of another kind of loyalty, loyalty to her own desire and herself. For Miles, loyalty means accepting fate. He stays in a dying city, working a hopeless job as a grill owner, even though the restaurant is failing. He stays loyal to his original intentions, while his wife stays loyal to her present emotions.
Tick and parasitism
Empire Falls has a tongue-in-cheek joke against teenagers. The dying marriage is patronized and antagonized by a unpleasant and unhappy teenager named "Tick," which is a joke because it points the reader to the objective facts of Tick's life. The imagery of being a teenager is shown to be taking what one wants and needs from one's parents while still judging them and holding one's self as a victim of bad parenting. This is obviously tongue-in-cheek, but from Miles' point of view, Tick is basically an ingrate and a parasite. The imagery is humorous.
Dysfunction and generation
When Miles stands near his stoner brother, he remembers that his life has been cyclical. Not only is he currently being left by an ungrateful, cheating wife, but he was also left by a cheating mother. He realizes that in a way, he has become exactly the kind of person who would revive that old conflict between he and his mother. In this way, the novel portrays an imagery: the imagery shows the method by which dysfunction is passed along from generation to generation. Tick is Miles but younger, and Miles is Tick, but older. Their shared struggle is low self-esteem which is both the consequence of mistreatment by a woman and the source of new mistreatment. The wife is clearly attached to her trainer because he has more self-respect than Miles can afford to give himself. The cycle has repeated in Tick's unhappy resentment.
