Willemstad
Imagery need not always be a robust litany of sensory details. Often, the most effective imagery is the most efficient. Nothing is quite as efficient as a precise rendering of details through a familiar comparison. In this example, the city in which the story begins is made tangibly real very swiftly:
“So when I woke up there was much excitement in the city, which looks like a part of old Holland, except that all the houses are painted in soft colors, pinks and greens and blues, and there are no dikes.”
Timothy
Timothy is the elder islander whom the narrator comes to know and depend upon once they are alone on the deserted island. At first, he is characterized by the narrator according to his physical appearance. This is due to the stark differences between them, of course. As time passes, Timothy becomes much more developed in the narrator’s consciousness:
“I looked closer at the black man. He was extremely old yet he seemed powerful. Muscles rippled over the ebony of his arms and around his shoulders. His chest was thick and his neck was the size of a small tree trunk. I looked at his hands and feet. The skin was alligatored and cracked, tough from age and walking barefoot on the hot decks of schooners and freighters.”
Translating English into English
One of the rarer utilizations of imagery in the novel is the idiosyncratic need to translate words spoken in English into a visual image within the narrator’s perception. This primarily occurs after the young narrator has lost his vision, but it is also a necessity of sorts before then on account of Timothy speaking in a heavily accented local patois which is rendered into written dialect by the author:
“`Young bahss, dere is, in dis part of d’sea, a few lil’ cays like dis one, surround on bot’ sides by hombug banks. Dey are cut off from d’res’ o’ d’sea by dese banks.…’ I tried to make a mental picture of that. Several small islands tucked up inside great banks of coral that made navigation dangerous was what I finally decided on.”
The Cay
The use of imagery to describe the actual geography and topography of the little deserted island the two characters call home requires that more robust litany of details than is necessary to describe Willemstad. In fact, at several points throughout the narrative, the reader is treated to a variety of details about the cay. The most efficient description occurs, interestingly enough, after the narrator has lost the ability to actually see what he describes:
“I think I knew what our cay looked like. As Timothy said, it was shaped like a melon, or a turtle, sloped up from the sea to our ridge where the palms flapped all day and night in the light trade wind. The beach, I now believed, was about forty yards wide in most places, stretching all the way around the island. On one end, to the east, was a low coral reef that extended several hundred yards, awash in many places.”
