“The Queue”
The central element in “The Queue” is a rural marketplace. So central is it to the story that the author actually chooses to open the tale with imagery which creates the necessary context for understanding the significance of this very specific setting:
“In the countryside all marketplaces look alike, more or less. They all consist of a large vacant lot with a fence and a gate. They all stalls with empty wooden shelves distorted by heat and the winter cold. Here and there you will find a few benches made of hay stuck together with dried mud.”
The Chair
In the story titled “The Chair Carrier” it is not really the carrier that requires the benefit of extensive imagery, but the chair itself. The carrier is more important, technically, but really they both require the other to make the story work. Without the imagery of the exactitude of the chair, however, the whole thing would kind of fall apart:
It was a vast chair. Looking at it you’d think it had come from some other world, or that it had been constructed for some festival, such a colossal chair, as though it were an institution all on its own, its seat immense and softy covered with leopard skin and silken cushions.
Forget it, Jake, it’s Mansourah
“All in a Summer’s Night” is a bit longer than the typical Idris story, but then again it requires the length in order to successfully cover nearly every single one of the author’s primary thematic compulsions. A whole lot of thematic territory gets covered in its fourteen pages and one could write an entire paper just on the use of imagery in this story alone. Arguably (and very much so, since the story’s closing image is absolutely haunting and heartbreaking) the central narrative imagery of the story is the following example as it symbolically establishes the divisions more fully explored throughout the rest of the story:
A heavy silence fell upon as we stared at the lights of Mansourah which now seemed to be within reach of our hands. To our fevered imagination the town became the embodiment of a woman with flesh like soft dough, draped in a dressing gown and leaning out from a balcony, beckoning for us to come.
“House of Flesh”
“House of Flesh” is a story in which imagery is the dominant principle of narrative conveyance. Everything is stated with a matter of fact quality by a narrator lacking passion or judgment. As the saying goes, the lives of these characters is what it is. Early on the reason why it is gets established through imagery:
The widow is tall, white, and slender, thirty-five. Her daughters are also tall, erupting. They do not remove their black, enveloping clothes, whether in mourning or not. The youngest is sixteen, the oldest, twenty; ugly girls, who inherited the father’s dark body, equally disproportionate in lumps and hollows. They barely got their mother’s figure.
