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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 9
Explanation and Analysis—Like Floating Temples:
At the start of Chapter 9, McCarthy describes the sun rising above a series of mountains using a simile:
He turned and placed one hand on the wooden cantle and looked toward the sun where it sat new risen above the bald and flyspecked mountains to the east. The floor of the playa lay smooth and unbroken by any track and the mountains in their blue islands stood footless in the void like floating temples.
Many of the descriptions of the landscape, like the simile above, are also instances of imagery. In describing how the sun looks, newly risen above the pristine landscape, McCarthy paints a vivid picture for the reader of the smooth playa floor and the beautiful mountain. In Blood Meridian, there is real sublimity and beauty in the inhospitable land Glanton and his gang traverse.
In referring to the mountains as "bald" and "footless," McCarthy almost anthropomorphizes them, making the mountains into near-living things. Comparing the mountains to "floating temples" once more makes nature something divine, this time a place to worship God. The mountains appear to hover in the air between the ground and the sky—between the earth and heaven—divorced from the world of man.
This intense, religion-evoking description precedes, as it so often does for McCathy, a description of a battle, this time between Glanton's army and the Apaches. The ungrounded nature of the mountains matches the ungrounded nature of the kid in the subsequent fight scene, who fights "as if he'd done it all before in a dream." The juxtaposition between the description of a beautiful landscape and the terrors of war appears time and time again in Blood Meridian and is crucial for understanding the novel. To what extent are people and their violence a consequence, or a perversion, of nature? How can such beauty coexist with such brutality?
Related Themes:
Chapter 11
Explanation and Analysis—S and L Alliteration:
Chapter 11 begins with an alliteration of "s" and "l" sounds as McCarthy describes an ascent up a wooded landscape:
The shoeless mules slaloming through the dry grass and pine needles. In the blue coulees on the north slopes narrow tailings of old snow. They rode up switchbacks through a lonely aspen wood where the fallen leaves lay like golden disclets in the damp black trail.
The repeated "s" sounds mimic the back and forth of switchbacks in the snow, an equally repetitive motion of winding one's way up the mountains that visually matches the letter "s." In onomatopoeic fashion, the "s" sound sonically matches the shuffling of leaves and pine needles on the ground that is being described in the quotation. The alliteration then helps convey the imagery of the scene to the reader, highlighting the sounds of the scene described by McCarthy.
The "l" in "leaves" and "laying" emphasizes, once more, the natural world McCarthy outlines for the reader, as well as the fact that the ground is littered with dead leaves. "Disclet" is either a word coined by McCarthy, as it seems to only appear in his novels, or else is simply archaic. We can imagine the definition of such a word—a small, disc-like object—but this word makes the natural world somewhat foreign to the reader, who is likely unfamiliar with the word. "Disclet" also combines the "s" and "l" sounds into a simile describing the leaves, sonically uniting the two sounds that dominate the quotation into one description of the natural world.
Chapter 12
Explanation and Analysis—Massacre :
Chapter 12 includes a moment where McCarthy, describing a brutal and violent massacre of the Gileños, paints a vivid picture:
There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives and a young woman ran up and embraced the bloodied forefeet of Glanton’s warhorse.
To include all of the violent imagery from Blood Meridian would be unpleasant, as well as lengthy, but the quotation above is a particularly effective example of McCarthy's detailed imagery. He insists on describing the violence in detail: what is seen, heard, and felt by both the perpetrators and the victims. The alliteration of "brains burst forth [...] bloody spew" is almost onomatopoeic, sonically puncturing the long sentence with the consonance that is the same sound as a gun, or a loud bashing. To bash in the heads of two infants simultaneously is one of the most viscerally unpleasant images one could conjure, and yet McCarthy dwells on the moment.
The fact that McCarthy is equally painstaking in his imagery of the brutal killings as he is with the natural world juxtaposes the two against one another, putting beauty next to suffering and almost suggesting that violence is somewhat natural. At the same time, McCarthy paints such a clear and visceral image of gore and violence that the reader cannot help but condemn the characters who commit these acts. Thus McCarthy shocks the reader with an exhaustingly long sentence full of content that is deeply unpleasant to read, emphasized by imagery and alliteration.
Related Themes:
