Chandelier (motif)
The chandelier is the first concrete object Hurtle sees that rings a bell of recognition and longing within him. When he first sees the chandelier at the Courtneys house, he says that while he has never seen one in real life before, he recognizes it as a mirror image to the one that lives inside him, emanating light and desire. From then on, he alludes to the chandelier in a positive way when he is feeling inspired and in a negative way when he has lost touch with his artistic desires. Near the end of the novel, Rhoda even alludes to the chandelier, saying that she is happy to have lived part of her life beneath it, its symbolic resonance as a source of beauty and longing having traveled beyond just Hurtle.
Vivisection (motif)
The novel is named for a person who engages in the act of vivisection, which is the practice of killing animals to study them for science. It comes up directly in the text when Mrs. Courtney takes it on as her new cause, unable to bear the thought of suffering animals. Throughout the novel vivisection takes on symbolic meaning as it relates to the figure of the artist who picks his subjects apart in an attempt to find some inner truth and understanding. Hurtle frequently refers to "God the vivisector" and there are dozens of images of dying animals peppered throughout the text, some even suffocating and drowning as Mrs. Courtney originally feared.
Lantana Plants (symbol)
Of all the recurring imagery in the novel, the lantana plants are ones that stick out, namely for the way they come to accrue symbolic resonance. The lantana plants are ever-present, appearing all throughout Duffield's life, whether he is gazing at them through his window or he is meeting Cutbush at the bench beside them or depicting them in one of his paintings. The lantana plants serve as a stand-in for the entire outside world; rather than name or describe many elements of the world outside his studio and his paintings, the lantana plants signify that world and the people in it who might be watching on as passersby.
Offal (symbol)
White frequently employs all manner of offal, from invoking the intestines of the vivisected animals, to Rhoda feeding her cats hearts, to talk of sheep guts torn out by hand, to Rhoda and Duffield eating some kind of horse organ. All of this blood and guts (as well as excrement, bodily fluids, and dead matter) serves to remind us of human weakness, which is Duffield's primary interest as a painter, and clearly one of White's interests as a writer.
The Color Blue (symbol)
That a novel of such lofty questions ends so earnestly on an answer puts a lot of pressure on that final image to succeed. As Duffield works away at his God painting, near death, White avoids the trappings of a more precise answer by pivoting to the symbolic realm: what does Duffield see as the highest aesthetic reach toward God? Blue – the color of the heavens, the color of the third eye, of water and the sky.
