Family
Bolden's personal life is the main consideration of this novel, so the most important imagery is family imagery because that is how he motivates himself to work hard, and that is also the domain of his most intimate struggles. He cannot help but be distraught by the betrayal of his wife, and the complexity of their marriage is the source of many important jazz solos later in the book. That complex experience of family is shaped by the major key of his love for his family, and by the various minor modes of his other emotions; he hates his wife at times, and at other times, strong emotions make him a wild man.
Art
Art is a secondary imagery in the novel, but it is a primary imagery of Bolden's experience of life. His approach to art is a helpful depiction of his character as a person. Because the reader knows about his jazz freeform solos as a trumpet player, the reader can also deduce something about his life. Since his art is an emergence of his own intimate psychology, we know that his art stems from a passionate awareness of his own thought life in all its complexities. The other symbol for this besides art is madness.
Community and work
From page one, through the turmoil of his painful home life, through the years of confusion and the descent into madness, one thing never changes about Bolden; he is always motivated to work a job as a barber. His role is community facing, and he gets to chat with customers as he improves their appearance. His focus on appearance can also be seen as symbolic, because he is motivated by the imagery of appearances, as an aesthetic artist, but also as a person who sometimes struggles to feel sane. Even at the absolute bottom of his decline toward schizophrenia, he still works as a barber.
Insanity
There is an imagery introduced in the second portion of the book that is only available to readers in the first part of the book in latent form. When the reader sees insanity developing in Bolden's mind, their mind turns to Bolden's constant artistic genius and his instinctual awareness of self. The imagery seems to suggest that he can only handle so much insight and turmoil before his self-revelation begins to devolve into archetypal experiences of his own self. As an insane person, he is surprisingly well-adjusted, showing that secretly he has been practicing covering his insanity for much longer than the reader might have expected.
