“He tried to…”
The protagonist of the book is a young man named Michael whose world swarms with references to comic book superheroes, movie characters and baseball. A disconnect creates a pervasive tension between the world he imagines and the world he must deal with. The result is litany of efforts made by Michael that recur so often with the phrase “he tried to” that it begins to serve the purpose of imagery:
“humming softly the melody of `The Blue Danube,’ he tried to picture a waltz.”
“He tried to imagine himself with a gun in his hand, making them beg.”
“He tried to conjure a face. He tried to invent a name. Neither would come”
Color Imagery
One of the efforts that he tries affords the opportunity for the author to indulge in a common sort of imagery. The point of imagery is to stimulate a more vivid image in the mind of the reader of the scene being described instead of merely telling the reader what he should be seeing. Color—in this case combined with sound imagery—is used effectively for this purpose:
“He tried to imagine the sound of the color red. He made a whooshing sound for a fast river, and threw in a train whistle as the railroad pushed west, and then the blues, sad and melancholy, and jigs and reels for the Irish arriving and `O Sole Mio’ for the Italians, and was trying to imagine music from the Jews, when he saw Bing Crosby, as he wandered over yonder just to see the mountains rise. Let me be by myself in the evening breeze. Listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees. Send me off forever but I ask you please.…And ended in Ebbets Field. The music for the color green sounded like buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack. I don’t care if I ever get back.”
Why Biblical Epics were So Popular
Ever wonder why the single most commercially successful Hollywood movie genre of the 1950’s was the Biblical epic? Two reasons: One, obviously, people were much more familiar with the more action-filled stories form the Old Testament back then. Reason number two is answered connotatively through imagery here as Michael first encounters the story of Judith:
“She was walking proudly, swinging her arms. Behind her on the left was a bearded guy on a horse. Obviously he was behind her because Judith was the boss, the commander. On the right was a bareshouldered woman in a striped dress, her head downcast under a shawl, carrying a bag. She must be the handmaiden, Michael thought, some kind of maid, the one who polished Judith’s bracelets and necklaces and earrings. There were more horses and a lot of guys with spears, and off in the distance there was the outline of a walled town. Bethulia.
It was like a scene from a movie…in Technicolor, on the screen at the Venus.”
America wasn’t Great For Everyone
The concept of returning America to its greatness experienced in the two decades following the end of World War II has some merit. Thanks to a high tax rate for the wealthiest, American was boomtown central. But even high taxes on the rich didn’t make the 1950’s great for everybody. Imagery in the form of words casually tossed around without a care back then reveals this to be so. Even for a brand new hotshot baseball player in his rookie year, America wasn’t so great:
“The Phillies manager was a southerner named Ben Chapman, who had been traded away from the Yankees before the war for calling the New York fans Kikes. Now that he was a manager, he could get the whole Phillies team to yell these things at Robinson. Kike didn’t work for Robinson. He wasn’t a Jew. So they called him a nigger. They called him snowflake. They said he should go back to picking cotton.”
