The Dog Races
Imagery is used to quickly delineate the cross-section of locals who are brought by a shared fascinating and interest to the greyhound race. Having already been compared to sewage oozing from a pipe, the narrator goes to get a little more specific:
“They were all there, all the spivs and the gypsies and the touts and the dregs and the sewage and the scrapings and the scum from the cracked drainpipes of the big town. Some with dogs, some without. Dogs led about on pieces of string, miserable dogs with hanging heads, thin mangy dogs with sores on their quarters…sad old dogs with grey muzzles, doped dogs, dogs stuffed with porridge to stop them winning, dogs walking stiff-legged…”
The Poacher’s Dream
“The Champion of the World” is about Claud Cubbage’s scheme to spike raisins with Seconal in order to facilitate the process of poaching pheasants. The narrator describes the immediate aftermath in which two-hundred birds have been victimized as a dream-come-true for a poacher:
“The hens were plump and creamy brown and they were so fat their breast feathers almost brushed the ground as they walked. The cocks were slim and beautiful, with long tails and brilliant red patches around the eyes, like scarlet spectacles. I glanced at Claud. His big ox-like face was transfixed in ecstasy. The mouth was slightly open and the eyes had a kind of glazy look about them as they stared at the pheasants.”
Irony
“Rummins” is a story which begins with a paragraph laden with imagery utilized for a specific purpose. The description of a beautiful day commences a story which only reveals the profound irony of that description when gruesome truth is revealed at the end.
“The sun was up over the hills now and the mist had cleared and it was wonderful to be striking along the road with the dog in the earl morning, especially when it was autumn, with the leaves changing to cold and yellow and sometimes one of them breaking away and falling slowly, turning slowly over in the air, dropping noiselessy right in front of him onto the grass beside the road.”
“The Ratcatcher”
The title character of this story is so thoroughly offensive to the senses that the use of imagery engaged at the most important point of the story is actually an example of avoiding imagery in order to convey the full sense of its gruesomely macabre aspects. The power of what happens lies in what the narrator chooses not to describe as much as what he does describe in the moment that the ratcatcher wins his bet that that he can kill a rat without using his hands, arms, legs or feet:
“Then suddenly he struck.
He struck as a snake strikes, darting his head forward with one swift knifelike stroke that originated in the muscles of the lower body, and I had a momentary glimpse of his mouth opening wide and two yellow teeth and the whole face contorted by the effort of mouth-opening.
More than that I did not care to see. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again the rat was dead and the ratman was slipping the money into his pocket and spitting to clear his mouth.”
