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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
Part 1, Chapter 1: The Boy with a Skull
Explanation and Analysis—Big Blood Sneezes:
In the aftermath of the museum explosion, Theo regains consciousness only to find a scene of absolute gore and horror. With explicitly detailed imagery, Theo brings the reader into the fearful moment:
There were at least a dozen people on the floor—not all of them intact. They had the appearance of having been dropped from a great height. Three or four of the bodies were partially covered with firemen’s coats, feet sticking out. Others sprawled glaringly in the open, amidst explosive stains. The splashes and bursts carried a violence, like big blood sneezes, an hysterical sense of movement in the stillness. I remember particularly a middle aged lady in a blood-spattered blouse that had a pattern of Fabergé eggs on it, like a blouse she might have bought in the museum gift shop, actually. Her eyes—lined with black makeup—stared blankly at the ceiling; and her tan was obviously sprayed on since her skin had a healthy apricot glow even though the top of her head was missing.
Even though the descriptions of the bodies and injuries are intense—“explosive stains” and “big blood sneezes”— the tone of the descriptions is markedly disconnected. Theo is looking at the death and destruction around him but not truly seeing it and internalizing the ramifications. What is no doubt a terrifying experience for 13-year-old Theo reads as an off-kilter description, devoid of fear and grotesqueness. Describing a middle-aged woman that he sees lying on the ground, Theo notes that her tan must be fake since “her skin had a healthy apricot glow even though the top of her head was missing.” By focusing on inconsequential details such as the tan hue on a woman’s skin, the story demonstrates Theo’s inadvertent attempt to stay grounded in reality. If he allowed himself to survey the room without tunnel vision, Theo might succumb to fear and shock.
Part 1, Chapter 2: The Anatomy Lesson
Explanation and Analysis—The Taste of Blood:
Still unwilling to accept the possibility that Audrey was killed in the museum, Theo busies himself with odd tasks. Even though many hours have passed since the explosion, Theo maintains hope and pushes aside his imagery-filled emotions and sensations:
The force of the explosion still rang deep in my bones, an inner echo of the ringing in my ears; but worse than this, I could still smell blood, taste the salt and tin of it in my mouth. (I would be smelling it for days, though I didn’t know that then.)
As a trauma survivor, Theo keeps going by suppressing the pain and ignoring the feelings that overwhelm him. Back in his own apartment, the intensity of the museum explosion infiltrates his thoughts and senses: he can smell and taste the blood, hear the ringing of an explosion’s aftermath, and feel the powerful waves of the bomb. However, focused only on escaping the museum and finding his mother, Theo does not allow himself—nor does anyone else give him the opportunity—to break down in grief and horror.
Theo’s refusal to accept his circumstances is evident in the way this imagery seems out of place in context, as Theo attempts to pry a sticky drawer open. Even as the trauma slowly seeps through, Theo continues to jimmy open the drawer and wonder when Audrey will return home. The taste of the salty blood and ringing in Theo’s ears completely wash over him—in the shock of the aftermath, he has developed tunnel vision. His only goal is to find his mother, and any other sensations—even the scent of blood—cannot drag him back down to reality.
Part 1, Chapter 3: Park Avenue
Explanation and Analysis—Pale and Silvery:
As Theo waits for his mother to return, two social workers show up at his apartment door to take him away, at which point he realizes the gravity and truth of the situation. When they take him to the residence of his school friend Andy Barbour, Theo sees Mr. Barbour again, painting him with specific imagery:
Mr. Barbour was a tiny bit strange-looking, with something pale and silvery about him, as if his treatments in the Connecticut “ding farm” (as he called it) had rendered him incandescent; his eyes were a queer unstable gray and his hair was pure white, which made him seem older than he was until you noticed that his face was young and pink—boyish, even. His ruddy cheeks and his long, old-fashioned nose, in combination with the prematurely white hair, gave him the amiable look of a lesser founding father.
Here, the colors and tones that Theo uses to describe Mr. Barbour—“silvery,” “incandescent,” “gray,” “pure white”, “pale”—paint an almost ghostly picture of the man. All at once, he seems both old with his “prematurely white hair” and young with his “boyish” face. Mr. Barbour exists in the gray with his not-quite-there presence and mismatched characteristics. The picture that Theo describes foreshadows Mr. Barbour’s tragic and untimely death further along in the novel. From the moment that the reader encounters Mr. Barbour, his aura is ghostly, which sharply contrasts with other representations of life and death in the story. For one, Audrey and Larry’s deaths occur unexpectedly, their lives tipping over from ripe to rotted in an instant, like the fruit in Adriaen Coorte’s painting. However, Mr. Barbour, faced with mental health challenges, dies as a result of his illness, albeit indirectly. With Theo’s description, it seems that Mr. Barbour has been withering away all this time, a living ghost, captive to his unhealthy mind.
Part 1, Chapter 4: Morphine Lollipop
Explanation and Analysis—Introduction to Hobie:
After Theo searches up Hobart and Blackwell in the yellow pages, he journeys to the West Village in search of answers. After ringing the green bell, Theo meets Welty’s business partner, Hobie, who he depicts with allusive imagery:
He seemed to be around fifty or sixty, poorly shaven, with a shy, pleasant, large-featured face neither handsome nor plain—a man who would always be bigger than most of the other men in the room, though he also seemed unhealthy in some clammy, ill-defined way, with black-circled eyes and a pallor that made me think of the Jesuit martyrs depicted in the church murals I’d seen on our school trip to Montreal: large, capable, death-pale Europeans, staked and bound in the camps of the Hurons.
Hobie becomes one of the most important figures in Theo’s life, teaching him a curated knowledge of antique restoration and later caring for Theo as a father. For all of Hobie’s impact on and kindness towards Theo, his first impression of the man is rather stilted and dull. Theo describes him as “poorly shaven” and “unhealthy” in pallor, which recalls Theo’s initial impression of Mr. Barbour when the family takes him in. However, unlike Mr. Barbour, who is undoubtedly kind at heart, Hobie becomes a constant and reliable figure in Theo’s life. Despite his declining health and financial status, he offers Theo a path in life. In contrast to the social workers, the Barbour family, and Theo’s paternal grandparents, Hobie understands Theo at a deeper level, having also lost someone in the museum attack. Hobie and his antique shop offer Theo a place of fulfilled solitude, where he finds a passion in antique restoration and sale.
Theo’s description of Hobie also alludes to the Jesuit martyrs, who were ritually killed for their efforts to evangelize the Hurons. By alluding to such a violent part of history, Theo reveals his now deep-set belief that everyone around him will disappear. However, Hobie breaks the mold by remaining one of the only constant parental figures in Theo’s life, both alive and present.
Related Themes:
Part 2, Chapter 6: Wind, Sand and Stars
Explanation and Analysis—The Seasonless Glare:
Theo’s time in Las Vegas is all at once dazzling and numb as he drinks his days away with Boris. Using verbal irony and repetitive imagery, Theo illustrates how his life in Las Vegas reflects the city itself:
Days ran changelessly in the seasonless glare: hungover mornings on the school bus and our backs raw and pink from falling asleep by the pool, the gasoline reek of vodka and Popper’s constant smell of wet dog and chlorine […] Winter or summer, the days were dazzling; the desert air burned our nostrils and scraped our throats dry. Everything was funny; everything made us laugh. […] Our diet had made us malnourished, with soft brown bruises on our arms and legs […] still had a heaviness in my chest that never went away and my teeth were rotting out in the back from all the candy we ate. Apart from that, I was fine.
Theo’s claim that he is fine and happy enough is nearly humorous: given his mental and physical decline, he is clearly far from fine. He indulges in too much alcohol in an effort to numb the pain, often drinking to the point of blacking out and vomiting. He starts to experiment with hard drugs, too, hoping to feel something again that isn’t grief or emptiness. Just as Las Vegas is a city of fabrication and fakes, Theo, too, lives through fiction. He and Boris deceive themselves into believing that they are living a good and happy life.
Moreover, Theo’s life in Las Vegas begins to blend into one massive drug trip in the desert, his days with Boris becoming rhythmic in his repetition of addictive behavior. With the phrase “days ran changelessly in the seasonless glare” and the description of Theo’s physical decline, the story illustrates how the repetition of life and seasons in Las Vegas only exacerbates Theo’s addictive tendencies and behavior. Without the air of change, like fall or winter in New York, it is easy for Theo and Boris to remain in their cycle of listless and criminal behavior. In the desert, though, nobody can hear—or even wants to hear—that their behavior is a cry for help.
Related Themes:
Part 4, Chapter 9: Everything of Possibility
Explanation and Analysis—A Thousand Different Ways:
Once Lucius Reeve accuses Theo of stealing The Goldfinch and threatens to expose him, Theo’s anxiety and paranoia take a dark turn. Though the painting has offered Theo comfort in times of need, as he explains with imagery and hyperbole, he understands the severity of his situation:
No good could come of keeping it. It wasn’t even as if it had done me any good or given me any pleasure. Back in Las Vegas, I’d been able to look at it whenever I wanted, when I was sick or sleepy or sad, early morning and the middle of the night, autumn, summer, changing with weather and sun. It was one thing to see a painting in a museum but to see it in all those lights and moods and seasons was to see it a thousand different ways and to keep it shut in the dark—a thing made of light, that only lived in light—was wrong in more ways than I knew how to explain.
To Theo, The Goldfinch is a masterpiece not for its subject matter and skill of brushstroke, but instead for its life and light, which come alive in “a thousand different ways.” Although Theo admits the impact of seeing The Goldfinch under museum lights in a gallery, where every angle is perfectly shown to the viewer, his relationship with the small painting deepened elsewhere. By taking the 17th-century masterpiece with him to Las Vegas, where he could pull it out from behind his headboard at any time, Theo allowed the art to wrap around and respond to his changing emotions and the fickle desert weather.
Seeing a painting in a museum on a particular day of the year, when a person is feeling a certain way, will be a resonant experience. However, being able to return to that piece of art over and over again in the different lights of life will undoubtedly be transformative.
It may be that Theo hyperbolizes the countless ways he saw The Goldfinch in Las Vegas, but it is equally possible that his experience was truly that immense.
Related Themes:
Part 5, Chapter 11: The Gentleman’s Canal
Explanation and Analysis—Delirium:
After the shootout, Theo completely unravels, fueled by guilt and paranoia: he locks himself in his hotel room, terrified to even send out his laundry, for fear that the police will find him. With a metaphor and other nautical imagery, Theo illustrates his delirium:
Somehow my dream of the sailboat had bled through and infected the hotel room, so it was a room but also the cabin of a ship: built-in cupboards (over my bed and under the eaves) neatly fitted with countersunk brass and enamelled to a high nautical gloss. Ship’s carpentry; deck swaying, and lapping outside, the black canal water. Delirium: unmoored and drifting. Outside, the fog was thick, not a breath of wind, streetlights burning through with a diffuse, haggard, ashen stillness, softened and blurred to haze.
At this point in the novel, the reader has returned to the start: Theo’s delirious and drug-induced stint in his Amsterdam hotel room. Theo has not only lost The Goldfinch again, but he has also killed someone. Life as he knows it is quickly disintegrating before his eyes, and Theo is no longer standing on solid ground. Having lost his passport in a foreign country and committed a hateful crime, Theo becomes terrified of being found by anyone. He turns to heroin, hoping its buoyant effects will soften the world around him.
Unfortunately, once the effects of the drugs wear off, Theo finds himself slipping in and out of dreams. These dreams mirror his feelings about his place in the world. The hotel room becomes a ship, lost at sea and hidden by fog. Like a ship in the night, Theo feels unmoored, completely uprooted by the previous day’s events. The nautical language also recalls Mr. Barbour’s love of sailboats and his unfortunate demise on the water. Theo’s days in the hotel room show that he, like Mr. Barbour, is mentally unstable, even attempting to kill himself with an overdose.
Related Themes:
