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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
Chapter 14: Checks
Explanation and Analysis—Swish, Click:
In the following instance of imagery from Chapter 14, Kaysen writes about how the "swishes and clicks" of "checks" by the nurses in the ward control the patients' lives:
Swish, click. Before you knew it, she'd be back. Click, swish, "Checks," swish, click.
It never stopped, even at night; it was our lullaby. It was our metronome, our pulse. It was our lives measured out in doses slightly larger than those famous coffee spoons. Soup spoons, maybe? Dented tin spoons brimming with what should have been sweet but was sour, gone off, gone by without our savoring it: our lives.
The auditory imagery of "swishes" and "clicks" shows how the patients in the ward keep time differently from the outside world. Their days are measured in the care they receive as opposed to life events, or even traditional minutes and hours.
The imagery of spoons measuring the patients' lives nods to the medication that the patients are given in the ward, including Thorazine, which is served in liquid form on a spoon. Additionally, to "spoon-feed" someone is to help them understand something or complete a task with a great deal of help and supervision; this is the exact kind of treatment that the patients are subjected to in the ward, often at the cost of their freedom. Indeed, the lives spoon-fed to Susanna and the others "should've been sweet but [were] sour, gone off"—a sign that the women feel like their lives are expiring.
Related Themes:
Chapter 26: The Shadow of the Real
Explanation and Analysis—Tunnels:
Susanna has an obsession with the tunnels that run underneath McLean. She describes them with the following imagery, which also contains an allusion, in Chapter 26:
First their wonderful smell: They smelled of laundry, clean and hot and slightly electrified, like warmed wiring. Then their temperature: eighty at a minimum, and this when it was thirty-three outside, probably twenty-five with windchill (though in the innocent sixties, windchill, like digital time, hadn’t yet been discovered). Their quavery yellow light, their long yellow-tiled walls and barrel-vaulted ceilings, their forks and twists and roads not taken, whose yellow openings beckoned like shiny open mouths.
For Susanna, the tunnels are a sign of hope for the future. She says so to Melvin, her therapist, when he argues they represent the womb. The intensity of this imagery shows how much space they take up in her brain. Aspects of the tunnels, such as their "wonderful smell," their "yellow light," and their "vaulted ceilings," conjure a type of paradise or nirvana. "Forks and twists and roads not taken" in the tunnels represent the vastness of life's possibilities on the outside of McLean, as does the image of "beckoning shiny open mouths."
These lines also contain allusions to "The Road Not Taken," a 1915 poem by acclaimed poet Robert Frost dealing with how one confronts life's wide array of choices. The poem's famous first two lines are: "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood / And sorry I could not travel both." These lines are recalled by Kaysen's images of "roads not taken" and "yellow light." For Susanna, the tunnels' vastness and dense network of paths represent the very concept of choice—something she longs to have access to but often lacks within the confines of the hospital.
Related Themes:
