The Imagined Birthday
As she reflects on the fact that she will not receive any birthday presents, Isobel devises an image of how events might play out under better circumstances, or in a different family, on her birthday: "While she ate her tea, she was thinking how wonderful it would be if beside her bed in the morning she found a huge box wrapped in paper, with a big bow and a card that said HAPPY BIRTHDAY ISOBEL" (8). The strength of Isobel's desire for a birthday present explains the specificity of her musings here; she even envisions a specific present, The Complete Works of Arthur Conan Doyle, as contained in the "huge box." Yet the imagined HAPPY BIRTHDAY ISOBEL card is an especially vivid, pointed reminder of what Isobel cannot have. She has nobody in her family who would offer her a present, or offer her (in contradiction of the card) much more than neglect and disregard on her typically unhappy birthday.
Family Violence
When Isobel remembers her mother and father, her thoughts are drawn to a scene of violence that occurred one day during a meal: her father's "chair had crashed over, he had picked up the knife from the bread board and run at her mother, who was cringing away with her head at a strange angle and a meek frown on her face, her hands out in front of her and the line of blood suddenly across her fingers" (35). The steady clip of Witting's prose reflects the sudden, surreal nature of such violence; neither the reader nor Isobel has much time to process what is going on before the "line of blood" materializes. Unsettling though this imagery is, it is also a reminder that violence—verbal, emotional, and indeed physical—is inextricable from Isobel's upbringing.
Mrs Bowers and Mrs Prendergast
Isobel makes precise observations of the physical features of Mrs Bowers and Mrs Prendergast when she first meets these two women. Mrs Bowers is a "tall elderly woman, ruddy-faced and ginger-haired," while her companion stares "with vague salt-water blue eyes into the distance" and is "so large and so soft she seemed to be made of whipped cream, and topped with a floss of silver hair" (54). These acute perceptions show that Isobel's vivid manner of viewing the world has not been dulled by the loss of her mother or any other change in her lifestyle. She may be a quiet young woman, but, even before she embarks upon life as a writer, she can size up the people around her almost as a talented comic novelist would.
Smoke the Cat
One of the most important images that arises in the later segments of I for Isobel is an image of Isobel's own design, the vision of Smoke the Cat that occurs in her poem. As described by the young Isobel, "Mrs Adams lives three doors from me. / She has a cat. Smoke is his name. / He curls around the corner silently. / When he jumps, his name should be Flame" (175). There is not much in the way of narrative to Isobel's poem, which relies instead on precise observations of an event that seems rather ordinary. Yet Isobel's attentiveness to Smoke's movements enables her to evoke Smoke's presence anew for Mrs Adams, and to create a mental image of the now carefully curling, now vigorously jumping animal for the reader of I for Isobel.
