Opening Lines
The opening lines use imagery to situate the premise of the book without just flatly stating the circumstances. The narrator identifies himself only as "the voice in the dark, asking you to unbury me, to bring me from the grave out into the light, like a zombi." This use of imagery hints at the revelation that the narrator is speaking from beneath the weight of a building that has collapsed on top of him following a devastating earthquake. Rather than simply telling the reader this, the author shows it by having the narrator create a sensory experience of being buried alive and existing only as a voice that may or may not ever be heard by rescuers.
Voodoo Zombies
The book speaks of the creation of a zombi (spelled without the "e" in this book) within the sphere of voodoo. "A person would be given certain plants, the extract of a certain fish, and these would conspire to slow his heartbeat, his breathing so that on cursory inspection he would appear dead." This passage clarifies the misconception of voodoo zombies as being separate from Hollywood's living dead version resurrected from the grave. The imagery here is essentially a recipe for the physical mechanism required to create a zombie. The final words irrefutably describe this entity as still living and only giving the false impression of being dead.
Flavored Water
The narrator asserts a fact by describing all the water he has ever tasted as "flavorless." And then, one day, he discovers "this water that the woman gave us, after we had been walking and sitting in the sun all day, it tasted of a thousand things – sunshine, shadows, bananas, mangoes." Rather than tasting like "air" the narrator's first encounter with bottled water can only be adequately conveyed through the use of imagery. This discovery that water can have a flavor calls for descriptive language ranging from the literal taste of fruits to the more abstract synesthesia of tasting light and darkness.
Marguerite
Imagery becomes an essential component in the characterization of a woman named Marguerite. "It’s like she had a soul that was much too big for her; it filled her to the brim till there was no more space, so then it flowed out through her eyes." This overabundance of the unseen soul is directed toward a woman whom the narrator also describes as a person everybody felt compelled to listen to whenever she had something to say. The overflow of a soulful appreciation for life intimates that she carries a capacity for caring for everything she sees. The narrator more literally sums this up by asserting how she cares for people and animals.
