Written language and journalism
The life of Gabriel Santoro is shaped by story. He works to find compelling stories, searching his own family's history for a connection to public history, and when he finds it, he writes a book about it. His attempt to capture real life in language is imagery that points at The Informers itself, because it is also a book written with language hoping to convey something compelling and true. This imagery is concrete and abstract, and it forms a meta-narrative because of the story within the story.
Familial imagery
The novel explores the abstract ways that Gabriel's desire to be accepted by his father shapes his reality. He writes a book hoping to get his father's love and approval, but instead he finds out that he accidentally ousted his own father who betrayed the community and is now called on the carpet to defend himself. The father says his son took a moral high ground when he wasn't even there—he didn't know what it was really like. The dilemma is a complex network of emotional dependence and interdependence, such that Gabriel wonders whether he did a good thing or a bad thing to his father.
The Holocaust
The imagery that informs the fictitious book "A Life in Exile" is the dark, savage imagery of the Nazi Holocaust which forced Sara Guterman's family to flee from Germany. Santoro is drawing on his real life experience of course, but also, without knowing it, he unearths some long-kept secrets about Nazi informants in his community. His attention to the Holocaust introduces an imagery that seems detached from his current reality, but actually is as close to him as his own father.
Justice and the court
When Gabriel's father dies, that brings a shift in the tone of the novel. It brings the imagery of the courtroom where a case is overturned because of the honest confessions of Gabriel's father about his participation in conspiracy. The death, along with the courtroom imagery, help the reader to see a picture of life as a judgment, where death is the stake, and where injustice is to betray one's community. This imagery points to the novel's theme.
