“The Figure in the Carpet”
The most significant use of imagery in the narrative is that which gives the story its title. It is initially introduced with language a bit more complex. This is fitting since the concept it is describing is a complex abstraction: “It was something, I guessed, in the primal plan, something like a complex figure in a Persian carpet.” This imagery is the narrator’s extemporaneous concept for describing an enigmatic “something” which holds the key to understanding the meaning at the heart of a famous author’s writing. The image is suggestive of something that is in plain sight but cannot be fully comprehended without attention to detail and serious scrutiny. As the narrative plays out, the imagery is distilled down to the titular phrase.
Something
The mysterious “something” that holds the key to the meaning of the author’s work is such an abstraction that just one single bit of imagery is hardly enough to do it justice. The author himself actually provides a litany of different images that suggest the same thing as the title of the story. Among his alternatives are “a little trick,” “an exquisite scheme,” “the thing for the critic to find,” and, ultimately, a thing “as concrete as a bird in a cage, a bait on a hook, a piece of cheese in a mouse-trap…stuck into every volume as your foot is stuck into your shoe.” This panoply of imagery is integral to the plot since the narrator will move forward from this conversation to dedicating the rest of his life to figuring out what the figure in the carpet actually is in reality. The brutal reality inevitably seems to be that the whole thing is just a little trick played upon a critic by an author grown weary of the critiques by those failing to understand his books.
Miracle
Two friends of the narrator, George and his future bride Gwendolen, soon commit to the hunt for the figure in the carpet by reading every word the author ever wrote until George, almost in rebellion leaves it all behind to take a job with a newspaper in India. Gwendolen receives a telegram out of the blue from George informing her that he has figured it out. She relates the news to the narrator: “…it’s the thing itself, let severely alone for six months, that has simply sprung out at him like a tigress out of the jungle…someday somewhere, when he wasn’t thinking, they fell, in all their superb intricacy, into the one right combination. The figure on the carpet came out…We knew the change would do it—that the difference of thought, of the scene, would give the needed touch, the magic shake.” This imagery constitutes a second-hand re-enactment by Gwendolen of an event that supposedly happened to George which she herself had prefaced by admitting to the narrator “He hasn’t gone into it.” Highly significant to keep in mind is that while George is a critic, Gwendolen published her first novel while still a teenager. What lingers mysteriously in the air is that this imagery describing something truly miraculous that supposedly happened to George sounds more like something from the pen of a novelist than the typewriter of a newspaperman. The narrative gives the reader ample reason to doubt both George and Gwendolen though the narrator himself does not seem to catch on to this possibility due to the intensity of his obsession.
