Colonel Joll's black sunglasses
“Two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire” (1).
The first image we see in the novel is that of Colonel Joll’s dark sunglasses. The magistrate has never seen sunglasses before, and they amaze him. The image of the dark sunglasses is the signature characteristic of Joll, who never removes them until his final scene when he returns from the desert, terrified and stripped. Otherwise the image of the dark glasses works to reflect a man whose eyes can never be seen. His true identity is obscured from all who encounter him, which is a powerful attribute for a man who seeks “truth” through interrogation. The image of the black eyes is also an image of soullessness. As well as this, the dark glasses are the image of a blind man.
Joll's delicate features
"His tapering fingernails, his mauve handkerchiefs, his slender feet in soft shoes..." (7).
This description of Colonel Joll's fine accessories and fragile physicality resonates through the novel and further defines this man of evil. The juxtaposition between such delicate imagery and his brutal character adds a dimension of psychological evil to a man who tortures people. He's not merely a hulking brute. He's a delicate and thoughtful connoisseur of torture. In a later scene we see him having taken over the magistrate's office that he has cleaned out. There's only a vase of fresh flowers on the desk.
The magistrate's autonomous phallus
"Sometimes my sex seemed to me like another being entirely, a stupid animal living parasitically upon me, swelling and dwindling according to autonomous appetites, anchored to my flesh with claws I could not detach. Why do I have to carry you about from woman to woman, I asked. Simply because you were born without legs? Would it make any difference if you were rooted in a cat or a dog instead of me?" (98).
This image of the magistrate's "sex" behaving as though it has a life of its own, independent of his brain, is a powerful and telling one that defines much of the magistrate's extended meditation on the nature of his desires, specifically in relation to his questions around mixed attraction for and repulsion from the nomad girl.
The essential image of torture
"A file of men, barbarians, stark naked, holding their hands up to their faces in an odd way as though one and all are suffering from toothache... A simple loop of wire runs through the flesh of each man's hands and through holes pierced in his cheeks" (103).
This image of the barbarians being marched naked into the town is the essential image of torture in the novel. It comes right before the climactic moment when the magistrate throws himself into the middle of the town square where the men are getting beaten, and finally attempts to intervene directly. The image is so viscerally painful that it is hard to forget. It resonates throughout the novel, and works to define the inhuman and outright sadistic nature of Joll's mission.
