Setting
Imagery is put to great effect in the description of settings throughout the book. One of the finest examples is that used to enhance the living quarters of what just a few sentences earlier was described to one character by another as the conditions of living in a cluttered atmosphere in order to facilitate the psychological state of the inhabitant:
What made the place strange was a multitude of things on the carpets, tables, sideboards and seats: a tripod upholding a telescope, a lantern-side projector aimed at a standing screen, celestial and terrestrial globes each a yard in diameter, a half-put-together jigsaw puzzle showing the British Islands, a fully furnished doll’s house with the front open exposing everybody from a thing maidservant in the attic bedroom to a fat cool rolling pastry in the in the basement kitchen…
Another Type of Nationalism
Nationalism is a word with a very bad connotation, deservedly so, that is linked with unthinking jingoistic dreams of an unwarranted supremacy. It should remain linked to the dark side of patriotism. Another type nationalism—in the form of simple kinship to country—is suggested through imagery:
“People who care nothing for their country's stories and songs,” he said, “are like people without a past- without a memory--they are half people”
The Most Terrifying Experience
The introductory sentence to the paragraph is that what is about to be described is the most terrifying experience of the narrator’s life. It is a description of a man opening only his mouth, the rest of his head motionless, and unleashing a scream:
When the scream came the whole sky seemed screaming. I had clapped my hands to my ears before this happened so did not faint as Bella did, but the single high pitched note sounded everywhere and pierce the brain like a dental drill piercing a tooth without anesthetic.
Literary Allusion
One type of imagery is the literary allusion or, for that matter, an allusion to any pre-existing creative work. The referential quality depends upon the popularity of the referenced: alluding to a cult movie makes the imagery perhaps less potent for most readers than alluding to a classic novel:
“You must because it is about us. Heathcliff and Cathy belong to a farming family and he loves her because they’ve been together and played together almost forever and she likes him a lot but finds Edgar more lovable and marries him because he is outside the family. Then Heathcliff goes daft.”
