Opening Paragraphs
Imagery is the literary tool of choice the author uses to open his story “The Circus in the Attic.” It is not anomaly; a cursory examination of the author’s body of short fiction proves that imagery is the tool of preference for drawing the reader into his tales. Another common bond is the relaxed, conversational tone and the narrator’s direct address to the reader:
“Let us assume that it is summer. Coming from the north, just at the brow of the ridge, you catch your first view of the valley and of Bardsville. There is the wide valley of Cadman s Creek, two miles below, opening sharp upon the river. To your right, to the west, there is the silver-green shine of the river and the green-silver shine of the rank corn in the bottom lands beyond, some miles away. But the sun-glazed highway spins off ahead of you, down the valley, like a ribbon of celluloid film carelessly unspooled across green baize. And at the end is the steel bridge over the creek.”
Setting
Setting is usually described as a combination of place and time. Sometimes the two so entwined as to lose a little meaning as a place takes on the feeling of being out of time. Such is the use of imagery in “Christmas Gift” in which a buggy ride from town to the poorest outpost of his practice comes to seem like a trip fat back into time:
“Away to the left a log house stood black under bare black trees. From it the somnolent smoke ascended, twined white and gray against the gray sky. The snow had stopped. Beyond the bottoms the knobs looked cold and smoky. From them, and from the defiles, fingers of mist, white to their blackness, crooked downward toward the bare land. The horizon rim, fading, sustained a smoky wreath that faded upward to the space without sun.”
Characterization
When it comes to imagery, few stories match the opening of the eccentrically title “The Patented Gate and the Mean Hamburger” when it comes to sheer volume. The opening paragraph serves to introduce the story’s protagonist, Jeff York, although he won’t be named until another three paragraphs down the road. That constitutes almost two pages because the first paragraph alone takes up a single page and—remember—it is nothing but imagery describing a man that, as the first sentence insists, we’ve all seen a thousand times:
“The color of the face is red, a dull red like the red clay mud or clay dust which clings to the bottom of his pants and to the cast-iron-looking brogans on his feet, or a red like the color of a piece of hewed cedar which has been left in the weather. The face does not look alive. It seems to be molded from the clay or hewed from the cedar. When the jaw moves, once, with its deliberate, massive motion on the quid of tobacco, you are still not convinced. That motion is but the cunning triumph of a mechanism concealed within.”
“The Confession of Brother Grimes”
This story indulges in ironic humor and commences with one of the more gruesome examples of imagery in the short fiction of Warren. That the horrific events described are presented almost inappropriately in the vein of black humor serves to foreshadow that ironic distancing to come:
“Archie's wife he'd been married to six months, her name being Sue Grimes before she married him, was the most sensational performer, when it come to taking punishment. That truck had a pole sticking out behind, and it just went through that Ford, including Sue Grimes, like the toothpick through a club sandwich. But Sue didn't hog all the punishment, there being plenty to spare. They found Archie bunched up in a field with so many bones sticking out of him they said he looked like a mad porcupine.”
