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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
Book 1, Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Heard Before:
In this passage James Baldwin uses auditory imagery to show the disappointment Rufus feels when standing outside a jazz club and wondering if he should go in. He peers into the crowded bar, which features an unremarkable band playing familiar tunes in a way that disgusts him:
Now he stood before the misty doors of the jazz joint, peering in, sensing rather than seeing the frantic black people on the stand and the oblivious, mixed crowd at the bar. [...] So they blew what everyone had heard before, they reassured everyone that nothing terrible was happening, and the people at the tables found it pleasant to shout over this stunning corroboration and the people at the bar, under cover of the noise they could scarcely have lived without, pursued whatever it was they were after.
The auditory imagery of this scene is a wall of noise, which feels like a blanketing, indistinct cover for everything that is really happening on the other side of the windows. The loud music also creates the illusion of closeness as people shout to be heard over the performance. Rufus hates this. To him, as a musician, jazz is supposed to be innovative and expressive; it should never be the same twice. People who "blow what everyone had heard before" are doing a disservice to the art form. Rufus is also disgusted by the fact that the mixed crowd of White and Black New Yorkers is paying no attention to the music. He assumes this must be typical and that it’s why the band plays a set that everyone has heard before. Instead of doing something experimental and meaningful with the music, they are merely providing comfort through familiar noise.
Instead of expressing Black excellence, the band plays a neutered and stagnant version of jazz to an indifferent crowd. Rufus feels that the jazz—which should be the center of the event—has been reduced to a background soundtrack that reassures audiences “that nothing terrible [is] happening” rather than challenging them to see the world as it really is.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—The Venom:
As Rufus and Leona have sex for the first time, Rufus feels a nauseating mixture of hatred mixed with lust for her. Baldwin expresses this through a simile and some startling visual imagery. The way Rufus experiences her body and the act they perform together becomes inextricable from his feelings about racial difference and inequality:
Rufus opened his eyes for a moment and watched her face, which was transfigured with agony and gleamed in the darkness like alabaster. Tears hung in the corners of her eyes and the hair at her brow was wet. [...] Under his breath he cursed the milk-white [...] and groaned and rode his weapon between her thighs. She began to cry. A moan and a curse tore through him while he beat her with all the strength he had and felt the venom shoot out of him, enough for a hundred black-white babies.
Leona’s body is all white, here; she is a White woman, but Rufus sees her as almost supernaturally white, “milk-white” and “alabaster.” This isn’t the whiteness of her Caucasian skin tone, it’s a symbolic Whiteness which differentiates her from Rufus’s Blackness. Rufus’s fury with the inequalities of his world gets tangled up with his sexual urges in this scene. As he has sex with Leona he enjoys the fact that she begins to cry and that her “brow [is] wet” with sweat. He isn’t making love to her, he is “beat[ing] her with all the strength he ha[s].” He takes out his anger and frustration with Whiteness in general on Leona’s particular Whiteness.
This idea overcomes him so intensely that he treats his penis as a weapon to kill her with here; when he ejaculates he feels he is filling her with his “venom.” Rufus’s sexual violence is a retaliation against the violence he feels the world has inflicted on him. Although Leona—in this first instance—seems to consent to and even enjoy its intensity, he “curses” her as though he is forcing himself on her. He imagines that he is taking revenge against Whiteness writ large as he uses "his weapon between her thighs."
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Seemed to Snarl:
Rufus feels tense as an Italian adolescent watches him with disdain when he sits in a park with Leona. Baldwin uses visual imagery and personification to show how hostilely the boy reacts to seeing a mixed-race couple spending time together:
Then he raised his eyes and met the eyes of an Italian adolescent. The boy was splashed by the sun falling through the trees. The boy looked at him with hatred; his glance flicked over Leona as though she were a whore; he dropped his eyes slowly and swaggered on—having registered his protest, his backside seemed to snarl, having made his point.
The visual imagery of the light and shadows’ play on the adolescent’s body makes everything seem black and white in this scene. Where the boy is “splashed by the sun,” its brightness overexposes his White complexion, while the shadows color him darker. This abrupt mix of light and darkness sharpens Rufus’s awareness of the boy’s disapproval; it reminds him that other people also think in black and white. It also provides a strong and highly contrasting visual image for the reader.
Rufus is extremely agitated by the boy’s insolent response to himself and Leona, so much so that he sees the boy turning his back as an act of aggression. Baldwin likens the boy’s backside to a creature that seems to “snarl.” Although the boy says nothing and does nothing but glance derisively at Leona and turn away, his body language infuriates Rufus. The refusal to speak allows the boy’s posture and expression to do the talking. He has silently "made his point" painfully clear.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—White Officer:
In this passage from the novel’s first chapter, Baldwin uses visual imagery and a flashback to show the reader the power Rufus’s violent military memories still hold. Rufus is in the middle of a conversation with Leona when this recollection interrupts his thoughts:
He laughed again. He remembered, suddenly, his days in boot camp in the South and felt again the shoe of a white officer against his mouth. He was in his white uniform, on the ground, against the red, dusty clay. Some of his colored buddies were holding him, were shouting in his ear, helping him to rise. The white officer, with a curse, had vanished, had gone forever beyond the reach of vengeance. His face was full of clay and tears and blood; he spat red blood into the red dust.
Rufus is being painfully subjugated by the White officer in this flashback. It brings the brutality and violence of boot camp into his present reality as he speaks to Leona. Even though she is not treating him violently, her Whiteness and the loudness of the bar they sit in send Rufus back in time to this moment.
Baldwin’s imagery here is all about contrast; between the white uniform and the red clay and between the White officer, the Black Rufus, and his “colored buddies.” The contrast between Rufus’s “white uniform” and the “red, dusty clay” is still powerfully present in his mind, and so the reader also draws closer to it. Visual details of texture and moisture, such as the “red, dusty clay” and Rufus’s “face...full of clay and tears and blood,” evoke how humiliating and infuriating being kicked in the mouth by the officer was for Rufus. After he leaves, everything seems to be blood-soaked, as Rufus “spit[s] red blood into the red dust.”
Related Themes:
Book 2, Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Bees and Thunder:
As he describes Eric sitting in the cottage garden in France, James Baldwin uses visual and auditory imagery and a simile to describe the idyllic scene. Eric is hovering between attempting to relax and worrying as he listens and watches for signs of Yves, who is swimming in the dangerously rough sea:
Eric sat naked in his rented garden. Flies buzzed and boomed in the brilliant heat, and a yellow bee circled his head. Eric remained very still [...] hoping that the smoke would drive the bee away. Yves’ tiny black-and-white kitten stalked the garden as though it were Africa, crouching beneath the mimosas like a panther and leaping into the air. The house and the garden overlooked the sea. Far down the slope, beyond the sand of the beach, in the thunderous blue of the Mediterranean, Yves’ head went under, reappeared, went under again.
The visual and auditory imagery of the cottage here all invokes the lazy, heat-soaked atmosphere of a garden in the summer. The “brilliant heat” of the sun beating down on Eric and droning and “booming” of insects make the garden seem very still, which is in stark contrast to the “thunderous” movement and power of the Mediterranean Sea. Eric is staying very still as he watches Yves, as though he can keep him safe by remaining motionless. The space of the garden itself appears peaceful enough for the kitten to play make-believe games, yet the ocean’s roar acts as a reminder of potential danger for Yves.
Related Themes:
Book 3, Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Really Black:
As Vivaldo mulls over Ida's infidelity, Baldwin uses visual imagery and metaphor to show Vivaldo’s confusion about the boundaries between black and white. Vivaldo stares into his cup, pondering his own formerly fixed ideas about the nature of color:
And he could not find himself, could not summon or concentrate enough of himself to make any sign at all. He stared into his cup, noting that black coffee was not black, but deep brown. Not many things in the world were really black, not even the night, not even the mines. And the light was not white, either, even the palest light held within itself some hint of its origins, in fire. He thought to himself that he had at last got what he wanted, the truth out of Ida [...]
As he stares into his coffee here, Vivaldo thinks to himself about how “black coffee” is really a shade of brown. He then broadens this observation to note that true blackness seldom appears, even in darkness like “night” or “the mines”. His attention to the fact that coffee is actually brown prompts him to question how rigid categories like Blackness and Whiteness might hide a great deal of important things. As he considers whiteness, he also observes that light, no matter how pale, contains “some hint of its origins in fire.” Whiteness is not solely whiteness, either, he realizes. The coffee is a metaphor for Vivaldo’s own confusion about the boundaries race and its politics have drawn between him and Ida. Spurred by the incorrect color designation of coffee, he’s reconsidering his rigid ideas about what constitutes Blackness.
Related Themes:
Book 3, Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—The Sun Struck:
As Yves descends into New York on the plane at the end of the novel, the author uses visual imagery to show the reader what he sees during landing:
The sun struck, on steel, on bronze, on stone, on glass, on the gray water far beneath them, on the turret tops and the flashing windshields of crawling cars, on the incredible highways, stretching and snarling and turning for mile upon mile upon mile, on the houses, square and high, low and gabled, and on their howling antennae, on the sparse, weak trees, and on those towers, in the distance, of the city of New York.
The narrator directs attention to the visual imagery of blindingly bright metallic reflections of sunlight. For a moment, to Yves, America as a whole—and New York in the distance—seems to be made of only reflective surfaces. All of its planes and angles are hard and unforgiving, a huge expanse of “steel,” “bronze,” and “glass.” This and the “mile upon mile” of highways he sees from above make America seem both very modern and very threatening. It also looks enormous, as Yves can see so much of the landscape at once. He is already feeling apprehensive about coming to America, and the enormity of this initial encounter doesn’t make him any more comfortable.
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