Aunt Alberta's Picture
"It was a picture of a ship - a ship sailing straight towards you. Her prow was gilded and shaped like the head of a dragon with wide-open mouth. She had only one mast and one large, square sail which was a rich purple. The sides of the ship - what you could see of them where the gilded wings of the dragon ended - were green. She had just run up to the top of one glorious blue wave, and the nearer slope of that wave came down toward you, with streaks and bubbles on it."
The cleverest thing about this passsage is that he narrator is painting the same image for the reader that the children in the story are seeing and giving it the same effect of the ship actually moving rather than just being painted in a dynamic way. The image that is created enables us to picture the different colors of the water and also the majestic and magical picture of a dragon sailing along the waves rather than a ship doing so. Because the waves are described in this way our sense of hearing is also brought into play as the narrators words convince us as readers that we can hear the water crashing and lapping against itself.
Sunlight on the Dawn Treader
"All the sunlight fell on her from (her port) side and the water on that side was full of greens and purples. On the other, it was darker blue from the shadows of the ship."
The narrator paints an image of sunlight that is not just the gold that would be expected but of sunlight that is colored by the different things around it. This image is entirely visual but forced the reader to think of familiar things like the sunlight and the ocean in a more multi-dimensional way, with water that would normally be a blues-gray being green and purple because of he angle of the light changing the reflection of the flags on the ship.
Adventure At Sea
"When they returned aft to the cabin and supper, and saw the whole western sky lit up with an immense crimson sunset, and felt the quiver of the ship, and tasted the salt on their lips, and thought of unknown islands on the Eatern rim of the world..."
This imagery appeals to our senses of sight and of taste and gives the reader some of the sense of adventure that the children were feeling. The entire sky is crimson and it feels as though the world is flat and they are going to sail over the edge of it; the description of tasting the salt of the ocean speaks to our sense of taste and again enables us to not only create a picture of what this is like but to feel as if we are actually there.
Storm at Sea
"(Lucy) saw a great rack of clouds building itself up in the west with amazing speed. Then a gap was torn in it and a yellow sunset poured through the gap. All the waves behind them seemed to take on unusual shapes and the sea was a drab or uellowish color like dirty canvas. The air grew cold."
This image speaks to our visual sense but also enables us to feel the change in temperature and the change in color from clean and bright to drab and dirty also enables us to feel a change is circumstances from calm to dangerous. The visual image had changed from something beautiful to something threatening which reflects the action in the story.
The Dark Island
"About nine in the morning, very suddenly, it was so close that they could see it was not land at all, nor even, in an ordinary sense, a mist. It was Darkness. It is rather hard to describe, but you will see what it was like if you imagine yourself looking into the mouth of a railway tunnel - a tunnel either so long or so twisty that you cannot see the light at the far end. And you k or what it would be like. For a few feet you would see the rails and sleepers and gravel in broad daylight; then here would come a place where they were in twilight; and then, pretty suddenly, but of course without a sharp dividing line, they would vanish altogether into smooth, solid blackness. It was just so here."
The author is detailed here in painting an image of the gradual descent into darkness and by relating this vision into something that the reader can relate to actually makes the image even more frightening. The many stages of darkness are described in such a way that it is not sufficient to just imagine one solid level of darkness; rather, there are many levels of gray, pink and black that lead us to the image of the total darkness treat eventually encompasses everything.
