Imagery as Foreshadowing
Very early in the book, McTeague is recalling his childhood with the focus being on his father’s reaction to alcohol. The imagery here is disturbing at first because it seems out of sync. Yes, McTeague’s dad was prone to getting drunk and becoming a brute, but it soon becomes clear to the reader that McTeague is not even close to being an alcoholic. Only much later—well into the story—does the point of this image of his father giving into the temptation of deviltry of liquor consumption on a schedule rather than a nightly occurrence come to make sense:
“…he was a car-boy at the Big Dipper Mine in Placer County, ten years before. He remembered the years he had spent there trundling the heavy cars of ore in and out of the tunnel under the direction of his father. For thirteen days of each fortnight his father was a steady, hard-working shift-boss of the mine. Every other Sunday he became an irresponsible animal, a beast, a brute, crazy with alcohol.”
Darwinian by Instinct
The phrase “without knowing why” becomes a kind of mantra that recurs whenever McTeague or Trina engage in behavior without understanding the motivation. McTeague, a simple man, is willing to penetrate no deeper into self-understanding than attributing so behavior to inherited instinct. Without knowing why, he is instinctively a Darwinian who puts his faith in the explicable, but natural order of genetic evolution. Such as when he is suddenly gripped by a brutish passion for Trina while she sits unconscious in his dental chair, but such imagery is pervasive throughout the book:
“It was the old battle, old as the world, wide as the world—the sudden panther leap of the animal, lips drawn, fangs aflash, hideous, monstrous, not to be resisted, and the simultaneous arousing of the other man, the better self that cries, `Down, down,’ without knowing why; that grips the monster; that fights to strangle it, to thrust it down and back.”
McTeague's Canary
Also found throughout the text are references to the canary McTeague keeps as a pet inside a gilded cage. The gilt is just one of more references to gold in the book than can be counted and so adds a specific layer to the meaning of the imagery. The bird trapped in a cage is a robust symbol for human imprisonment, of course, but the gold covering the cage speaks directly to the issue of imprisonment of many of the human characters: not just McTeague, but Trina and, especially, Zerkow. These and others are all trapped in a cage of a passionate desire for wealth which each expresses in a different manner. Despite the differences, however, it all of the same. The cage moves past symbolic imagery for McTeague, however, when his attachment (without knowing why) to the bird eventually becomes the agency of his literal doom:
“`Well,’ said one of the deputies, as he backed the horse into the shafts of the buggy in which the pursuers had driven over from the Hill, `we’ve about as good as got him. It isn’t hard to follow a man who carries a bird cage with him wherever he goes.’”
Trina's Descent
McTeague at first admires the frugal economic policy of his wife (which he deems to be inherited as a result of the penurious nature of the mountain people from which she has descended). That frugality soon enough transforms into a mania which moves well past mere OCD and into the realm of psychotic fetishism conveyed by increasingly disturbing imagery as the story progresses:
“`Ah, the dear money, the dear money,’” she would whisper. `I love you so! All mine, every penny of it. No one shall ever, ever get you. How I’ve worked for you! How I’ve slaved and saved for you! And I’m going to get more; I’m going to get more, more, more; a little every day.’”
