Narrator
The dominant imagery of the story is the young boy’s narration and how it is demonstrates repeatedly the failure of language to adequately convey experience. The story’s opening line encapsulates this failure and situates itself as a recurring motif: “something happened that we didn’t have a name for, but it was there nonetheless like a lion, and roaring, roaring that way the biggest things do.” His experiential lacking of appropriate vocabulary, his confusing figurative imagery and the hesitant repetition of a word in an attempt to help the reader visualize something perfectly clear inside his own head are examples of imagery pointing to his developmental lag in transforming apprehension into comprehension.
The Arroyo
The little gulch across the street takes on a mammoth significance that betrays its connotation. The imagery of an arroyo is typically a very narrow and very shallow channel of water more akin to a “crick” than a river. In the imagination of the narrator and Sergio, however, it has become for two young boys a world until itself. The imagery with which the narrator describes the arroyo takes it far outside any appropriately literal realm of physical depiction:
"It was our river, though, our personal Mississippi, our friend from long back, and it was full of stories and all the branch forts we had built in it when we were still the Vikings of America, with our own symbol, which had been carved everywhere, even in the sand, which let the water take it. That was good, we had decided; whoever was at the end of the river would know about us.”
The Golf Course
Long before they know what it actually is, the golf course the two boys discover is described in the imagery of the ineffable. The ability of language to describe experience at this point collapses entirely and the narrator must move outside the realm of experience in order to convey things. He starts out with the fantastical, but ultimately proves capable of moving down only to the level of constructed fantasy:
“And on the other side of this hill we found heaven.
It was just as we thought it would be.
Perfect. Heaven was green, like nothing else in Arizona. And it wasn’t a cemetery or like that because we had seen cemeteries and they had gravestones and stuff and this didn’t. This was perfect, had trees, lots of trees, had birds, like we had never seen before. It was like The Wizard of Oz, like when they got to Oz and everything was so green, so emerald, they had to wear those glasses”
The reference to the Emerald City as described in Baum’s original book (rather than the movie) is particularly illustrative imagery since it is an example of constructed fantasy within a constructed fantasy. The glasses are another trick of the phony Wizard to bamboozle the residents of Oz; the glasses designed to “protect” their eyes from the vivid colors of the city are in fact tinted green and succeed in making the residents believe the Emerald City is green when in reality without the glasses, it is the same as any other city. This imagery recalled here will prove to foreshadow the revelation of the “heaven” they think they’ve stumbled onto.
The Garden of Eden
That heaven turns out to be a metaphorical Garden of Eden, but remember what happened there. The imagery here rises from the level of metaphor to outright allegory. The boys relaxing on perfectly manicured grass so green it defies reality as they feast on sandwiches to the accompaniment of no noise but the whistling of birds. So perfect is this little oasis surrounded by Arizona desert that it even comes with its own built-in drink holder. It does seem to be just as perfect as they thought it would be. And then…
“suddenly these two men came, from around a corner of trees and the tallest grass we had ever seen. They had bags on their backs, leather bags”
This may be the single best use of imagery in the story. What could possibly ruin heaven? Slithering from the grass with leathery skin are allegorical serpents and the boys are about to be cast from paradise.
