Cloudy Days
Over the course of the book’s first fifteen pages, the phrase “cloudy day” (or its plural) is repeated five times. After the first page of fourth chapter, it is never seen again. Robert Neville is cast at the beginning of his story as a man curiously obsessed with the condition of the daytime sky. Because the reader doesn’t learn the exact significance of why cloudy days are bad, it is imagery that is especially effective in subtly building suspense. At the same time, learning right literally the first words of the book that Neville is so intensely focused on the status of clouds in the sky is also effective at communicating that he is a man attentive to detail, which will become significant later.
Three O’Clock…Jump
Having established that Neville is a man of habit with an eye for detail verging on the obsessive, the author introduces imagery designed to effectively exploit that character trait by undermining it. By now, the reader knows the significance of cloudy days is that it makes it harder to judge when sunset is nearing as well as the significance of not being out after sunset. Taking advantage of the safety of the daytime to get stuff done, he is always acute aware of how far away he is and how long it takes to get back to safety before sunset and so depends literally for life upon his watch. Until one day when he looks at the watch:
“Three o’clock. Plenty of time to get back before they came.”
And so gets more stuff done in the time he has. And then he checks his watch again:
“Three o’clock. Plenty of time to—He jerked up the watch and held it against his ear, his heart suddenly jumping. The watch had stopped.”
The use of repetition here is a perfect use of imagery because it once again reminds the reader that Neville is a creature of habit who so far has been remarkably efficient and effective as making those habits work to keep him alive. When for the first time it doesn’t, it is all the more shocking. The repetition also works on another level: Neville admits that after engaging in his habits to the point of becoming routine, he has become much better at coping with the horrors of his life than with the monotony. So the repetition of the same phrase becomes an image complementing that aspect of the narrative. Making it all the more effective: the final four words end the chapter.
Vampires are Women, Too
One of the most striking examples of recurring imagery speaks to the loneliness of being the last normal human man on the planet. Despite being written in the 1950’s, the author not only does not shy away from situating the sexuality component of this situation, he attacks in a surprisingly explicit way and wastes no time doing so. The very first chapter paints his loneliness as a targets by “women posing like lewd puppets in the night on the possibility that he’d see them and decide to come out.” Just two chapters later, his mind is back to the same place: “the lustful, bloodthirsty, naked women flaunting their hot bodies at him. No, not hot. A shuddering whine wrenched up through his chest and throat.”
He Is Legend
Perhaps the most arresting imagery in the entire novel occurs just a few paragraphs shy of the end. After following the novel’s protagonist in excruciating detail as he protects himself against the threat of vampires at night, kills them by day and figures out what caused them in the first place, Robert Neville has fulfilled all the requirements expected of any hero in a vampire story. Along the way, however, the reader also learns that what seemed like mere defense and protection is actually more complicated. Not all vampires are the same and some vampires and more equal than others. And he’s been unknowingly killing the more equal along with the other. In the process, his actions are not viewed as either heroic or self-preservation. That these acts could make him the monster and the vampires the norm finally hits home the novel’s most single most chilling image:
“Abruptly that realization joined with what he saw on their faces—awe, fear, shrinking horror—and he knew that they were afraid of him. To them he was some terrible scourge they had never seen, a scourge even worse than the disease they had come to live with.”
