Previous
Hyperbole
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 2
Explanation and Analysis—Blank and Void:
Living in West Helena, Arkansas, with his Aunt Maggie, Richard goes back to school. The teacher asks him to write his name on the board and introduce himself to the class. Richard, overcome with fear, cannot bring himself to write his name. He describes the feeling, in Chapter 2, using physical imagery:
Again I turned to the blackboard and lifted my hand to write, then I was blank and void within. I tried frantically to collect my senses, but I could remember nothing. A sense of the girls and boys behind me filled me to the exclusion of everything. I realized how utterly I was failing and I grew weak and leaned my hot forehead against the cold blackboard. The room burst into a loud and prolonged laugh and my muscles froze.
The reader better understands Richard's emotions because he richly describes them using imagery. First he is "blank and void": Richard feels, as he does at other points in the novel, as if he is physically empty, evoking the sensation of fear. Then he clarifies this emotion: he is not necessarily empty, but in fact "filled" with a "sense" of the students behind him. Richard's social anxiety is extreme at many points in the novel, but here it is at its strongest. Richard feels himself to be entirely filled up with concern for how he is seen by others, all of his empty space packed with terror. Then the physical imagery of Richard's bodily experience draws the reader fully into the moment. His anxiety becomes physical in his hot forehead, leaning against the cold blackboard. The specific physical image evokes through temperature Richard's futile attempts to soothe himself. Richard remembers this moment as a bodily experience, the description of which speaks to his mental state.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Almost Painful:
Granny, with her strict religious rules, prevents Richard from finishing Bluebeard, a book he had started reading with Ella. Granny thinks that the book is "the devil's work" and is the source of Richard's foul language. Using imagery, Richard describes in Chapter 2 how disappointed he is that he doesn't get to finish the book:
Not to know the end of the tale filled me with a sense of emptiness, loss. I hungered for the sharp, frightening, breathtaking, almost painful excitement that the story had given me, and I vowed that as soon as I was old enough I would buy all the novels there were and read them to feed that thirst for violence that was in me, for intrigue, for plotting, for secrecy, for bloody murders. So profoundly responsive a chord had the tale struck in me that the threats of my mother and grandmother had no effect whatsoever.
Despite repeated beatings for reading, Richard still is interested in literature and will not be deterred. He describes how he "hungered" for the books, using a variety of physical imagery. He reads them to slake his "thirst" for action and excitement. He describes his enjoyment through physical sensations, "breathtaking," "almost painful." Without books his body feels empty; that reading the book feels like striking a chord extends the physical descriptions to auditory imagery. In this early period of the book, literal hunger is one of the central problems in Richard's life, so describing his desire to read as a "hunger" is yet more powerful.
Related Themes:
Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis—Rabbit's Foot Dangled:
In Chapter 5, Richard, living with his Granny and in the sixth grade, gets a job selling papers, ostensibly to make spare change. In reality, he took the job because he enjoys reading the literary supplement at the back of the newspapers, desperate as always for any kind of reading material. But thinking that the news doesn't apply to him as a young Black man, he never reads the news, only the silly stories in the back. As such he is appalled when an old Black man, to whom Richard tried to sell a paper, informs him that in fact the paper is distributed by the Ku Klux Klan. It contains virulently racist content and caricatures of Black men, such as this one that Richard describes with detailed imagery:
I looked at the picture of a huge black man with a greasy, sweaty face, thick lips, flat nose, golden teeth, sitting at a polished, wide-topped desk in a swivel chair. The man had on a pair of gleaming yellow shoes and his feet were propped on the desk. His thick lips nursed a big, black cigar that held white ashes an inch long. In the man's red-dotted tie was a dazzling horseshoe stickpin, glaring conspicuously. [...] A chain of gold girded his belly and from the fob of his watch a rabbit's foot dangled.
This caricature depicts a Black man as president of the United States (as explicitly described after this passage). It was meant to criticize how, in the view of the KKK, Black people were acquiring too much power in American politics. It uses a variety of imagery meant to parody and demean by depicting stereotypes of Black men. The man is unclean, greasy, and sweaty, a gross exaggeration of a continuing stereotype that Black people are unhygienic. He is large, strong, and physically imposing. The man in the cartoon is insubordinate and irreverent, with his feet up on the desk, depicting a stereotype of bad behavior that White people apply to Richard throughout the memoir. Similarly, the man wears bright, exuberant colors and gold jewelry, mocking characteristics of African fashion passed down to African American styles. He also carries a rabbit's foot, often stereotyped as a Black superstition in minstrel songs and other media in the U.S. in the 20th century. Richard is appalled by the political cartoon and tries to understand it. The image, while one of the novel's most frank depictions of White racism, also shows how Richard in his young adolescence is just starting to understand racism and all its effects. Richard says "it all seemed so strange and yet familiar"—the Black man looks recognizable to him, but is warped by racism that he does not yet fully comprehend.
Related Themes:
Chapter 6
Explanation and Analysis—A Touch of Sun:
In Chapter 6, in the summer after seventh grade, Uncle Tom moves in with Richard, Granny, and Addie. One day, Tom wakes up Richard and asks him the time. Richard tells him it is "eighteen past five"—rather early in the morning—and then adds that he knows his watch to be accurate, and "if it's a little slow or fast, it's not far wrong." This apparently entirely innocuous statement sends Tom into a blind rage at Richard's sass, one of the many moments in the novel in which Richard does basically nothing and is abused horribly for it. Richard arms himself with razors and faces Tom in the backyard, refusing to be beaten by someone who isn't a family member. The confrontation ends with imagery that describes both men facing off:
"And you've just been baptized," he said heavily.
"The hell with that," I said.
We stood in the early morning light and a touch of sun broke on the horizon. Roosters were crowing. A bird chirped near-by somewhere. Perhaps the neighbors were listening. Finally Uncle Tom's face began to twitch. Tears rolled down his cheeks. His lips trembled.
Tom reminds Richard that he has "just been baptized," and Richard does not care. Then both of them seem to have a realization at the same time: Tom realizes that Richard doesn't care about religion and is, in his view, morally irredeemable; and Richard realizes that Tom, despite being an older man, is no role model and is in fact "a warning." These simultaneous realizations are represented in the imagery of the passage: the "early morning light" gleams just at the moment each character fully understands the other. This "touch of sun" and the birdsong accompanying it, then, is a sort of pathetic fallacy, replicating the dawning realizations of both characters. Light is often a representation of knowledge and ideas. Here the morning light, clarifying the entire world around them, shows that Richard is coming to better understand all the structures of racism that control his life.
Related Themes:
Chapter 11
Explanation and Analysis—Where It Was Sore:
In Chapter 11, Richard moves to Memphis and moves in with the Moss family. Mrs. Moss is confusingly nice to Richard, taking him in with little payment and immediate affection. In a terribly sad moment related through imagery, Richard refuses to eat dinner with the family and instead wants to eat beans and bacon alone in his room. Richard's heart fills with shame at the thought of someone, at last, taking care of him. Mrs. Moss asks, "Why would you want to eat out of a can when you can set at the table with us?" Richard responds, turning away, "I don't want to be a burden to anybody." Mrs. Moss assumes that Richard is an orphan or at least seriously neglected:
"You just ain't never had no home life," she said. "I'm sorry for you."
I stiffened. I did not like that. She was reaching into my inner life, where it was sore, and I did not want anyone there.
"I'm all right," I mumbled.
Richard does not like this presumptuousness about his past, a feeling described using gruesome imagery that unites the physical and emotional. Richard imagines that Mrs. Moss's assumption about his childhood is like someone reaching physically into his flesh, where his "inner life" is. He describes that part of his past as "sore"—this is both literally true, as Richard certainly still feels pain from his repeated physical beatings, and figuratively true, as Richard knows that his past is more complex and traumatic than Mrs. Moss is implying. This "soreness" informs the reader about Richard's emotional state throughout the memoir. He struggles to connect with others and often feels different from those around him. This passage shows the reader that he isolates himself because he does not want people to probe into his past—it still feels sore, like all his many physical wounds.
Related Themes:
