Ellen Hanks
Character description is always a robust opportunity for the use of imagery. “Everything she wore was tight: tight jeans. Tight silk blouse, tight leather jacket, casings for her tightly wound interior. Tightly wound in a fun way, though, like one of those pistols in cartoons that only shoots bouquets of flowers from the muzzle. She was so skinny her head looked like it was the wrong size. So did her purse, which was leather and the size of a tent.” This imagery describes Ellen Hanks, the star of the Real Housewives of Minneapolis with big ambitions for transforming herself into a brand. The comparison to a cartoon character, the absurd dimensions of her purse, and the equally bizarre perceptual disconnect of her physique all work together for a common purpose. They combine to cement the idea that Ellen is already well on her way to losing her humanity and becoming the kind of caricature of humanity that is a necessity to make the leap from pseudo-celebrity to brand.
Jules Verne
Imagery that is dependent upon historical allusion is a trickier sort of imagery to pull off. It only really works if the original point of reference is understood. Throughout much of Chapter Four, the narrator repeatedly refers to an unnamed bartender as “Jules Verne.” This works as imagery because the name is an allusion to the famous author, but it only makes sense if one knows that Verne was a late 19th century author. “I took the liberty of ordering my usual cocktail of beverages from a bearded, suspender-wearing man who looked like he belonged in a Jules Verne trilogy… who seemed nostalgic for an era a hundred years before his birth…Jules Verne looked back and forth between us. `So…’ he said to Ben. `The check?’…Jules reappeared with the receipt and a pen, and as I scribbled my name on the exorbitant tab.” It is not until the final appearance of Jules that the point becomes clear. The imagery of “Jules Verne” is not about the author or even about the anonymous waiter’s physical appearance. It is a commentary on the persistence of 19th century sexism even well into the 21st century.
Mean Girls
“Girls are mean. Wild animals, really, stuck in tight zoo-y confines. What I’d learned in school—way more important than the subjects—was that it was okay to stand out, but only if you stood out in the right way, with looks and body and stuff. Not too much though, and the less you talked, the better. Even then a lot of girls would probably hate you.” The imagery linking the mean girls in high school with predatory animals in the wild is hardly innovative, but still it remains effective. As is the complicated calculus involved knowing how to stand out and how much to stand out. The problem is that the overwhelming bulk of this book’s readers are already going to know all this.
Self-Revelation
In a first-person narrative, the use of imagery inevitably comes around to self-revelation. The narrative becomes a kind of waiting game until the protagonist spills the bean about themselves: “I’d never told anyone about the antenna in my brain before, how I felt like an alien because of the static I heard around other people. How the sound of the static changed depending on their mood; how I could hear, amidst the static, their thoughts and feelings, even when they tried hard to hide them…that when I read books the air around me sounded clear and sweet…I thought books might be better than people because people were always pretending.” One can immediately understand why the narrator confesses to not being overly generous in sharing this insight into herself. Saying such things to the wrong person could definitely make one sound more than a little crazy. This confession is being made to a best friend, however, and so dangerous imagery like “antenna in my brain,” and feeling like an alien, and static interference in psychic abilities become a risk willing to take. In this case, the risk pays off.
