Goldilocks
The fairy tale “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” is utilized as imagery to describe both Earth and any planet which is capable of supporting life. Directly characterized as being not hot enough to destroy living things but hot enough to melt water. The imagery refers to Goldilocks enjoying the belongings of the baby bear which, in comparison to that of his father and mother, is “just right.”
“The Youth Room”
The young female narrator, Petra, is introduced to the suspended animation section of the spaceship known as “the Youth Room” using imagery. “Three rows of six stasis pods line the room and sort of look exactly like … eggs in a carton.” The reference to a carton of eggs is not just descriptive. The imagery also serves as foreshadowing. When the ship reaches a distant planet after hundreds of earth-years in flight, the children will exit the pods like chicks entering a strange new world.
The Spaceship
Imagery is effectively used to convey the effort put into making the spaceship traveling through outer space to a distant planet seem as much as like earth as possible. At the same time the imagery works to demonstrate the mammoth size of this space ark. “Walking paths, like veins in a leaf, weave through the green below. Scattered benches and tables along the trails look miniature from where we stand at least fifteen meters above. Lanterns glitter like fireflies lighting the paths.” The paths and lanterns are described using language which attempts to endow a man-made construction with organic attributes. The reference to the comparative size of the benches and tables puts the magnitude of this park covering almost the length of the ship’s floor stark perspective.
Anti-Conformist Thought
The antagonist of the novel is an organization known as the Collective which seeks to create a new haven for humans in which all the differences which led to a continuous state of war on earth are replaced by absolute conformity of thought. The opposition to this argument is fostered through the us of imagery early in the novel. The narrator’s geologist father shows her a rock in which a “yellow vein runs through the crimson rock. The red is similar in hue to the stone he’s just placed in his little pail.” When he explains that though they are the same kind of rock, jasper, they aren’t meant to be identical rather to complement each other, noting that it is the differences which makes thing beautiful.
