“Imagery” refers to representations in literature of things available to the five senses. Imagery is not only visual, but it is also auditory, olfactory, gustatory, or tactile. An author’s selection of detail, i.e. which images are chosen to represent a character, scene, or event, has a profound effect on the reader’s experience.
For example, Annie Dillard describes an unusual phenomenon of light in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:
The green ray is a seldom-seen streak of light that rises from the sun like a spurting fountain at the moment of sunset; it throbs into the sky for two seconds and disappears.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
A close reader will note how imagery interacts with the other elements of literature to make meaning. In the example above, note Dillard’s use of a figure of speech: she uses a simile to describe the streak of light. How might her simile and subsequent use of the verb “throbs” affect a reader’s understanding of the image?
Note in the example below how Ahmed Ali uses a tactile image, the feeling of heat, combined with an olfactory image, the stink of a sewer, before showing us the sleeping inhabitants of Delhi:
Heat exudes from the walls and the earth; and the gutters give out a damp stink which comes in greater gusts where they meet a sewer to eject their dirty water into an underground canal. But men sleep with their beds over the gutters, and cats and dogs quarrel over heaps of refuse which lie along the alleys and cross-roads.
Ahmed Ali, Twilight in Delhi
How might this imagery from the first chapter of the novel symbolize the state of the old muslim city and its inhabitants after the city’s colonization by the British?
More than lending concrete detail to a literary work, an image may stand in for a concept, in which case it becomes a symbol, as Hester Prynne’s scarlet ‘A,’ worn on her chest against a black background. The color red symbolizes sin while the color black evokes death.
My eyes fastened themselves upon the old scarlet letter, and would not be turned aside. Certainly, there was some deep meaning in it, most worthy of interpretation, and which, as it were, streamed forth from the mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities, but evading the analysis of my mind.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
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