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Idioms
Definition of Imagery
Imagery, in any sort of writing, refers to descriptive language that engages the human senses. For instance, the following lines from Robert Frost's poem "After Apple-Picking" contain imagery that engages... read full definition
Imagery, in any sort of writing, refers to descriptive language that engages the human senses. For instance, the following lines from Robert Frost's poem "After... read full definition
Imagery, in any sort of writing, refers to descriptive language that engages the human senses. For instance, the following lines... read full definition
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—The Boss Took It:
Visiting Mason City early in Chapter 1, Willie makes conversation with the locals. But one resident, Malaciah, the soda jerk at the drugstore, is hesitant to shake Willie's hand. Jack, observing from the sidelines, describes the awkward scene, using his nickname for Malaciah, "Old Leather-Face":
The Boss started toward him and put out his hand. Old Leather-Face didn't show. Maybe he shuffled one of his broken brogans on the tiles, and his Adam's apple jerked once or twice, and the eyes were watchful out of that face which resembled the seat of an old saddle left out in the weather, but when the Boss got close, his hand came up from the elbow, like it didn't belong to Old Leather-Face but was operating on its own, and the Boss took it.
Malaciah doesn't want to shake the Boss's hand. But Malaciah's leathery hand seems attracted, magnetically, "operating on its own." The meaning of the imagery here is clear: Malaciah questions the veracity of Willie's demeanor and personality and hesitates to shake his hand, but Willie's magnanimity and charisma seems to pull his hand in anyway, as Malaciah comes to trust Willie despite his doubts. This initial distrust is shown through the sensory imagery in the passage. The auditory imagery of Malaciah's shuffling brogans shows his anxiety and tension. This is amplified by the visual imagery of his jerking Adam's apple and emotionless, "saddle"-like face.
The handshake itself also works as imagery, describing the strength of Willie's political ambition. Willie's hand reaches all the way forward to Malaciah, asserting himself completely. This gesture represents Willie's persistence in politics. Not only is he willing to go all the way out to Mason City, not only is he willing to go all the way to individual constituents and meet them at their job and talk to them, but he is willing to reach all the way to pulling their hands up so that they will shake with him. This gesture shows that Willie's political ambition drives him to sway even the most apparently apathetic citizens.
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Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Arms Pinwheeling:
During Willie's riotous speech in Upton, Tiny Duffy, his political rival, tries to come on stage and contradict him to the audience. But Willie, drunk and hungover from the previous night and in a fit of passion, pushes Duffy off the stage, and he falls in quite humorous fashion:
I don't know whether Willie meant to do it. But anyway, he did it. He didn't exactly shove Duffy off the platform. He just started Duffy doing a dance along the edge, a kind of delicate, feather-toed, bemused, slow-motion adagio accompanied by arms pinwheeling around a face which was like a surprised custard pie with a hole scooped in the middle of the meringue, and the hole was Duffy's mouth, but no sound came out of it. There wasn't a sound over that five-acre tract of sweating humanity. They just watched Duffy do his dance.
Duffy, overweight and bumbling, tumbles off the stage in a hilarious dance, face like a pie, "arms pinwheeling." Simple comic relief is one purpose of this image. It is also a moment of situational irony. The audience attending the speech, as well as the reader, expects a political event, generally a clean, buttoned-up affair governed by decorum and tradition, especially in the 1920s. But that audience gets anything but decorum and tradition: Willie, sick and drunk, gives a wild speech and then shoves his main rival off the stage like a slapstick comedy performance. Jack makes a meal of describing how Duffy falls off the stage, emphasizing the irony.
Willie's shove here also serves as imagery. This moment, as Willie triumphantly dispatches Duffy off the stage, represents Willie and Duffy's political careers. Here, as Willie's rousing speech at Upton starts to propel him toward greater success, he literally removes Duffy from the campaign, just as Willie's continued success will prevent Duffy's from rising further.
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Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis—Same but Different:
Visiting the man he thinks to be his father in Chapter 5, Jack observes the Scholarly Attorney attending to George, the former circus performer he has taken in. The Scholarly Attorney dotes on George, in this moment leaning over him tenderly, feeding him a piece of chocolate, and cooing at him gently. The Scholarly Attorney, while ignoring the man he believes to be his son, looks at this old, insane stranger and calls himself "Daddy." Jack is, understandably, taken aback by this. Looking at the Scholarly Attorney, Jack's imagination bursts into a flashback:
I was looking there at the old man, [...] who was holding out another morsel of chocolate and who was clucking soft, and whose own face was happy, [...] and as I looked at him I suddenly saw the man in the long white room by the sea, the same man but a different man, and the rain of the squall driving in off the sea in the early dark lashed the windowpanes where the rain ran down to thread and the night-black glass with silver [...]
The Scholarly Attorney seems pleased with his new arrangement. But Jack sees him "in the long white room by the sea." It is unclear whether this is a real flashback to a room by the sea or if Jack is imagining a fictitious past. These sort of debatably real flashbacks are a common narrative device in the novel. But this house certainly seems like it could be in Burden's Landing, which is also on the seashore. In the flashback he imagines "the man" in a more peaceful place; the wind and rain "was a happy sound and safe because the fire danced on the hearth and on the windowpanes."The Scholarly Attorney was "the same man but a different man," clearly identifiable but changed nearly beyond recognition.
So Jack imagines in this flashback that the Scholarly Attorney has experienced a fall from grace, from a peaceful life, seemingly with a more normal domestic dynamic, to the strange situation in which he now finds himself, disheveled in a squalid apartment coddling a mentally ill old man. This type of fall from grace is one of the great themes of the book: Willie, Irwin, and the Scholarly Attorney all have an acute fear of some moral failing that will cause them to lose their exalted position. Jack, in a flash of self-pity after seeing his father neglect him, has a vision of this fall from grace occurring.
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Chapter 7
Explanation and Analysis—Teasing Paradox:
Chapter 7 of All the King's Men includes an extended flashback to Jack's first courtship with Anne Stanton, after he learns that she was having an affair with Willie. In his total shock and sadness, Jack sets off on a drive to California and remembers the beginning of his relationship. The flashback begins when he was 21 and Anne was 17. Jack had been friends with Adam since childhood, so he knew Anne, but here he describes seeing her on a fine summer afternoon and immediately falling in love with her:
She was wearing a white linen dress, cut very straight, and the straightness of the cut and the stiffness of the linen did nothing in the world but suggest by a kind of teasing paradox the curves and softnesses sheathed by the cloth. She had her hair in a knot at the nape of her neck, and a white little ribbon around her head, and she was smiling at me with a smile that I had known all my life but which was entirely new, and saying, "Hello, Jack," while I held her strong narrow hand in mine and knew that summer had come.
Jack describes Anne's clothing in great detail, which works as imagery to describe her character. The white dress represents Anne's purity and youth. She is, again, only 17 in this flashback, significantly younger than Jack. Also, throughout the novel, Anne is known for her somewhat naive morality and pure worldview, a relative innocence also represented by the color white. He also describes how her dress covers her figure. Jack's flashback describes Anne in this way because, in the novel's main timeline, Jack feels entirely betrayed by Anne due to her affair with Willie. As he frets about Anne misrepresenting herself in the modern day, so too does he imagine her 17-year-old self hiding things with the cut of her dress. (This jealousy and misogyny is one of Jack's least admirable traits.)
However, through all of this Anne is still described as being uniquely beautiful, and in a testament to the depth of Jack's affection, as if holding her hand is like the beginning of summer. Jack's love for Anne is still apparent despite his anger and sadness over her duplicitousness. In sum, the way that Jack's flashback depicts Anne—beautiful, innocent, but seemingly hiding the truth—shows the reader his complex opinions toward her at this point in the novel.
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