Opening Line
In what can accurately be described as a puckish sort of sense of humor, the author commences his stale with imagery that is both limited in scope and of profound significance. The full dimension of the scope of the significance of this rather quick delineation of character through deceptively meaningless imagery will not be revealed for some time:
“The skipper thrust his hand into one of his trouser pockets and with difficulty, for they were not at the sides but in front and he was a portly man, pulled out a large silver watch.”
Red
In a way, this story is entirely about imagery. That is to say that narrative twists and turns entirely on the axis of the imagery of its characters. The title character—although his name is not really Red—is an example of the power of imagery to broadly convey a meaning beneath the surface of physical description. Red is being described here by Neilson, in recollection of a long ago past and of a man he claims that he himself had never seen, but only heard about second-hand:
“He was tall, six feet and an inch or two--in the native house that used to stand here was the mark of his height cut with a knife on the central trunk that supported the roof--and he was made like a Greek god, broad in the shoulders and thin in the flanks; he was like Apollo, with just that soft roundness which Praxiteles gave him, and that suave, feminine grace which has in it something troubling and mysterious. His skin was dazzling white, milky, like satin; his skin was like a woman's."
The Skipper, Two
The narrator is not yet done with his physical description of the skipper. A fair number of paragraphs into the story as it is just on the precipice of the flashback that will serve as it true narrative, the reader is given more information about this portly gentleman. In fact, some might argue they are given too much information in this description of the skipper as seen through the unspoken perspective of Neilson:
“He was a tall man, more than six feet high, and very stout. His face was red and blotchy, with a network of little purple veins on the cheeks, and his features were sunk into its fatness. His eyes were bloodshot. His neck was buried in rolls of fat. But for a fringe of long curly hair, nearly white, at the back of his head, he was quite bald…He wore a blue flannel shirt, open at the neck and showing his fat chest covered with a mat of reddish hair, and a very old pair of blue serge trousers.”
The Man in the Mirror
Neilson has been talking to the skipper the whole time, conveying the recollections of a strange story from the past that he claims is based in part on hearsay and not an eyewitness account of his own. It turns out, however, that this Red whom he never saw but seems to know quite a bit about is none other than this very man he has been telling the story to. And so, yes, that means that each of the four different examples of imagery all describe exactly the same person, albeit at different stages of life and through various perspectives:
“Though he had been addressing the skipper he had not been talking to him, he had been putting his thoughts into words for himself, and with his eyes fixed on the man in front of him he had not seen him. But now an image presented itself to them, an image not of the man he saw, but of another man. It was as though he were looking into one of those distorting mirrors that make you extraordinarily squat or outrageously elongate, but here exactly the opposite took place, and in the obese, ugly old man he caught the shadowy glimpse of a stripling.”
