Scratching an Itch
In response to being asked what it is that he wants, François thunderously replies that he wants to be left alone. In reality, “he wanted not to feel alone…wanted, so desperately it lived as an itch beneath his skin, the very itch that drove him to unscrew time and again the metal tops of his various toxic bottles.” The imagery of the itch is used to illustrate how desirable yet unfulfilling his desire not to feel alone is and why that lack of fulfillment has driven him to drink. An itch is usually ignored at first until it becomes unbearable which is when scratching becomes a short-term solution. This imagery perfectly applies to the short-term solution of turning to alcohol to solve the problem but then, just like scratching becomes a greater annoyance than the itch, his solution to his loneliness threatens to become a bigger problem. This probelm also makes the issue it was intended to resolve even worse. Just as scratching tends to make an itch worse.
Precarious
A conversation about how everything is life is precarious becomes a discussion about why such common knowledge cannot be said out loud. Multiple examples of imagery are used. “Everything is precarious…we are not allowed to say so, that we must all pretend that we aren’t stepping, each day, along a tightrope over a fire-filled gorge that would at any instant swallow us…and the fire or the water can rise up and swallow us, or the plane can drop out of the sky.” The concept of life itself being constantly in a precarious state is made concrete with the extreme images of being consumed by fire or water or plans falling from the sky. The key to this discussion is the image of the tightrope and the pressure placed upon a walker to keep from thinking how dangerously precarious their particular situation is because admitting to that thought may be just the thing that causes disaster.
The Isolation of the Writer
Chloe, the only character in the book who tells her story in the first-person, opens the novel with the assertion that she is a writer, a teller of stories. Later she will give the backstory to the process that resulted in the confidence to introduce herself this way. She contemplates her plans to leave the man sleeping beside her “for studio in a high-rise by the interstate in icy Syracuse…so that I…shackle myself, all but literally, to my writing dream, force myself into a place where I’d know nobody and nothing, a sort of monastery among strip malls.” Every bit of imagery in this plan speaks to the necessity of isolation and loneliness of becoming a writer. The apartment is high in the sky above the masses moving at high speeds below and it is situated in a cold, bleak setting where she sees herself almost as a prisoner or a silent monk committed to no social interaction with any others.
Book Lover
Every book lover born in the 20th century will be familiar with the use of imagery to convey one character’s experience upon walking into a bookstore. “The bookshop, from the first, had smelled delicious to Denise, of paper, ink, sawdust, cedar, cigarette smoke, and perhaps even a touch of mildew, though Fräulein Lebach ensured that it was kept impeccably clean.” Before too long, of course, this use of olfactory sense memory will be a thing of the past except for an increasingly smaller select few. Readers of the future are far less likely to actually be “book lovers” because digital versions don’t bring on any particular bouquet that can only be experienced in a room filled with books requiring actual paper and ink. The imagery is true to the reality of the smell of just about every bookstore in the world.
