A Small Town
One of the most effective and famous uses of imagery in the novel is that describing the little village of Gopher Prairie through the eyes of cosmopolitan girl Carol for the first time. The language is actually very simple, direct and non-judgmental, but when connected to the particular perspective of Carol, it is nothing less than a devastating indictment of tedium:
“The broad, straight, unenticing gashes of the streets let in the grasping prairie on every side. She realized the vastness and the emptiness of the land. The skeleton iron windmill on the farm a few blocks away, at the north end of Main Street, was like the ribs of a dead cow. She thought of the coming of the Northern winter, when the unprotected houses would crouch together in terror of storms galloping out of that wild waste. They were so small and weak, the little brown houses. They were shelters for sparrows, not homes for warm laughing people.”
Mrs. Bogart
By contrast, the imagery used to describe Mrs. Bogart does not need to be filtered through the perspective of Carol or anyone else. It is pure, openly hostile judgment expressed by a third-person narrator intended to be accepted as fact from the horse’s mouth. The horse being the author:
“Mrs. Bogart was not the acid type of Good Influence. She was the soft, damp, fat, sighing, indigestive, clinging, melancholy, depressingly hopeful kind. There are in every large chicken-yard a number of old and indignant hens who resemble Mrs. Bogart, and when they are served at Sunday noon dinner, as fricasseed chicken with thick dumplings, they keep up the resemblance.”
Village Virus
The central imagery associating small town life as something which essentially stifles the very life spirit of some and, even worse, is infectious and capable of easy transmission to new arrivals is coined by Guy Pollock as “Village Virus.” That term was actually the origin of the novel as the author prepared for writing a story using it as the title. Instead, it becomes the imagery most associated with the insidious negative effects of small-town existence:
“the germ which…infects ambitious people who stay too long in the provinces. You'll find it epidemic among lawyers and doctors and ministers and college-bred merchants—all these people who have had a glimpse of the world that thinks and laughs, but have returned to their swamp.”
A Day in the Life
Chapter 22 commences with the narrator pondering over the melancholy mystery of how people manage to put in a full 24-hour day every single day, one after another after another. Shortly after reaching the conclusion that no human being in history ever experience a feeling of contentment attained solely from the knowledge that they have it better off than others, a masterful paragraph composed of little but pure imagery describes Carol’s typical day:
“she got up, dressed the baby, had breakfast, talked to Oscarina about the day's shopping, put the baby on the porch to play, went to the butcher's to choose between steak and pork chops, bathed the baby, nailed up a shelf, had dinner, put the baby to bed for a nap, paid the iceman, read for an hour, took the baby out for a walk, called on Vida, had supper, put the baby to bed, darned socks"
