Beetles
The presence of beetles is significant throughout the book. The imagery used to describe them is important. “It body is shiny black, with intermittent yellowish stripes…about two inches long…antennae are about twice as long as the body…three horns…Two on either side of the head and one in the middle, extruding upward. It comes to me. A horned rhinoceros.” The descriptive language makes it almost impossible not to imagine exactly what this insect looks like. The imagery is intended to suggest something that is familiar yet not quite familiar at the same time. The comparison of the tiny bug to the enormous African mammal cements this idea of the recognizable also being strange.
In Darkness
Imagery is used in several ways throughout the story to convey the idea of the strangeness of the familiar. “It’s pitch - dark out now. I can hear the crickets and critters in the canola. I look around. This is where I’m from. It’s what I know.” In this case, the imagery brings to mind the sounds of a place we can recognize even without benefit of sight. Even while lost in the darkness of his home, that home is familiar enough to still be recognized. The reliability of recognizing what we see and hear every day is one of the themes pursued by the story.
First Sight
The narrator describes the memory of the first time he saw the girl he would marry. “She was wearing a white T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. She had her hair up in a loose bun with strands that had drifted down around her face. I sat in the dirt under a tree, on my haunches, resting my elbows on my thighs.” The significance of the imagery of this description is its simplicity. The story is about a seemingly very average couple with nothing of any great significance. This portrait of both the wife and the husband is one presenting that simplicity as being there from the very beginning. Nothing unusual or exceptional about either is suggested or implied.
Interview
Even something as simple as an interview between two people uses imagery to convey the idea of strangeness within the commonplace. “The attic is the hottest place in the house…Instead of sitting facing each other, I’m facing the wall, and Terrance is positioned behind me. He tells me to sit and relax. I sit. And I hear him take a seat behind me. I can’t see him, only hear him.” The narrator complains that the uncomfortable environment of the attic makes it a strange place to conduct an interview. The visual composition of the placement of the chairs contributes to that sense. That the narrator can only hear and not see other person completes the picture of an interview that is nothing like any recognizable interview.
