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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
Imagery
Explanation and Analysis—Orchard Memory:
As the two girls reminisce in the cafe, Twyla is struck by imagery in her memory of the gar girls in the St. Bonny's orchard:
We both giggled. Really giggled. Suddenly, in just a pulse beat, twenty years disappeared and all of it came rushing back. The big girls (whom we called gar girls—Roberta’s misheard word for the evil stone faces described in a civics class) there dancing in the orchard, the ploppy mashed potatoes, the double weenies, the Spam with pineapple.
This moment shows how sense perception and memory are tied together in the story. Embodied experience is very important to Twyla's account. She understands her relationship with Roberta through her senses: through the image of the gar girls, the sound of civics class lectures, and the taste of the orphanage food.
Narrating the memory through these sense experiences, Twyla appears to be yearning for a shared experience of the world with Roberta, unmediated by social restrictions on behavior like race or class. She grounds her memory in physical sensation and the material world. Despite the different directions life has taken both girls, and their different societal statuses based on race and class, the two can reunite through their shared embodied memories.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Final Diner:
Twyla uses imagery in the final scene to hearken back to all the previous moments of the story:
I nodded and couldn’t think of any way to fill the silence that went from the diner past the paper bells on out into the snow. It was heavy now.
At this point in the story, Twyla makes reference to her present setting (a diner, quite similar to Howard Johnson’s) while the two girls talk about St. Bonny’s. It is a hodgepodge of all the story's different settings and brings together the disparate places and moments, albeit somewhat imperfectly.
She notes that the "silence" at the diner and the world beyond is impossible to fill because, by the end of the story, Twyla's life, memory, and relationship with Roberta have become so confused that she feels unable to speak of them. No words could make sense of her emotional state or the world she finds herself in.
She again turns to sensory descriptors to relate her experience, this time especially focusing on silence and "heav[iness]." "Heavy" is a significant word in the passage because it describes her emotional state, the rapid fall of snow, the content of their conversation, and the blanket of silence that wraps the moment. Twyla's imagery hints toward an understanding that nothing but the material world can be understood or explained. There is no conclusion or resolution to the story beyond the onslaught of more images.
