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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
Part 1
Explanation and Analysis—The Candle:
All the Pretty Horses opens with visual imagery, highlighting the movement of a candle’s flame and its reflection in the window of John Grady's home, where his grandfather's funeral is being held:
The candle flame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door.
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Explanation and Analysis—Blevins the Serf:
In Part 1, the narrator uses imagery and a simile to describe Blevins’s sorry condition after he’s lost his clothes and some Mexican men try to buy him as a slave:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The boy’s bony legs were pale in the firelight and coated with road dust and bits of chaff that had stuck to the lard. The drawers he wore were baggy and dirty and he did indeed look like some sad and ill used serf or worse.
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Part 2
Explanation and Analysis—The Hacienda:
The narrator uses imagery to introduce the hacienda to the reader in Part 2, highlighting especially its beauty and biodiversity:
Unlock with LitCharts A+[The hacienda] was well watered with natural springs and clear streams and dotted with marshes and shallow lakes or lagunas. In the lakes and in the streams were species of fish not known elsewhere on earth and birds and lizards and other forms of life as well all long relict here for the desert stretched away on every side.
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Part 3
Explanation and Analysis—Jailhouse Dream:
After Rawlins and John Grady are taken to prison and find out Blevins has killed three men in Part 3, John Grady had an idyllic dream about horses in the countryside. The narrator uses imagery to emphasize the tranquility of the dream:
Unlock with LitCharts A+That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wild-flowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running […] they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised.
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Part 4
Explanation and Analysis—The Solitary Bull:
The very end of All the Pretty Horses contains visual imagery and simile. The vivid description of a lone bull parallels John Grady's prior suffering in the novel:
Unlock with LitCharts A+There were few cattle in that country because it was barren country indeed yet he came at evening upon a solitary bull rolling in the dust against the bloodred sunset like an animal in sacrificial torment. The bloodred dust blew down out of the sun. He touched the horse with his heels and rode on.
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