Delphine
For a writer, nothing offers the opportunity to create imagery quite like reading. Other writers become the tapestry of the life of a writer and allusions to them often wind up becoming shorthand for describing their own characters. But in this instance, the author is taking things almost too literally as the names of famous writers serve the purpose of striking juxtaposition with a certain character’s own harsh reality:
“She read Edith Wharton, Hemingway, Dos Passos, George Eliot, and for comfort Jane Austen. The pleasure of this sort of life — bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life — had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing. She inhabited one consoling or horrifying persona after another. She read E. M. Forster, the Brontë sisters, John Steinbeck. That she kept her father drugged on his bed next to the kitchen stove, that she was childless and husbandless and poor meant less once she picked up a book.”
Go West, Young Sausage Maker
What is imagery, really, but a series of individual words that, when linked together thematically, lend a literal description a more robust metaphorical meaning. Imagery need not be poetic to put the message across. For instance, there is nothing remotely aesthetic about either the choice of words or the way in which they are put into action as imagery, but the job gets done just the same:
“He spoke only the English that he had learned on the ship, words specific to his intent — train, train station, west, best sausage, master butcher, work, money, land. His family’s fortunes now lay solely with him and, as he saw it, his ability to maintain a watchful silence. In his calm immobility, it was true, there was a power. But that was complicated by the restless sweep of his eyes, which were of a blue so transparent that his skull seemed lighted from within.”
Nun Sense
A certain nihilistic, angsty, Nietzschean certainty of the existence of the abyss and the non-existence of an all-knowing, all-wise potentate looking out for each of us creeps into the narrative. Actually, not so much creeps in as barrels through like a defensive tackle trying out for a part in Swan Lake. This existential dread results in an example of imagery that takes quite a logical leap to make this paradoxical instruction manifest:
“God was all good. Lie! God was all powerful. All right, maybe. But if so, then clearly not all good, since He let her mother die. All merciful? Lie. Just? Lie…Delphine counted and even wrote the lies down in the margins of her textbooks and library books. Lies! More lies! She wrote so fiercely that for the next five years the nuns would admonish their students both to disregard and to bring to their attention any books bearing handwritten annotations.”
Addiction
A sudden turn in the narrative briefly transforms it into a portrait of addiction. In this case, the drug is morphine and the imagery conveying the horror of addiction to prescribed narcotics is every bit as harrowing as anything portraying the hellish nightmare of being a heroin junkie or coke addict:
“The fierce drops kept her alert. She knew that occasionally, behind her, Eva made sounds. Perhaps the morphine as well as dulling her pain loosened her self-control, for in the wet crackle of the wind Delphine heard a high-pitched icy moan that could have belonged to Eva. A scream like the shriek of tires. A growling as though her pain were an animal that she wrestled to earth.”
