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Hyperbole
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
Key Examples in Middlesex
Book 1: Matchmaking
Explanation and Analysis—Filmic Imagery:
Cal/lie frequently uses the language of film to characterize emotions and events in the novel, a narrative choice that morphs into motif as the story progresses. Note the following example of this imagery from Chapter 2:
And so now, having been born, I’m going to rewind the film, so that my pink blanket flies off, my crib scoots across the floor as my umbilical cord reattaches, and I cry out as I’m sucked back between my mother’s legs. […] [W]e’re out of America completely; we’re in the middle of the ocean, the sound track sounding funny in reverse. A steamship appears, and up on deck a lifeboat is curiously rocking; but then the boat docks, stern first, and we’re up on dry land again, where the film unspools, back at the beginning…
Related Themes:
Book 1: The Silk Road
Explanation and Analysis—Nationality and Smell:
In Chapter 4, Desdemona and Lefty spend much of their time stuck onboard boats, crowded in with other European immigrants attempting to escape to America. Note the following description of the young couple's living situation, complete with sensory imagery:
Unlock with LitCharts A+In those days you could identify a person’s nationality by smell. Lying on her back with eyes closed, Desdemona could detect the telltale oniony aroma of a Hungarian woman on her right, and the raw-meat smell of an Armenian on her left. (And they, in turn, could peg Desdemona as a Hellene by her aroma of garlic and yogurt.)
Related Themes:
Book 2: Henry Ford’s English-Language Melting Pot
Explanation and Analysis:
A key element of Eugenides' writing style in Middlesex is interlocking, extended imagery and figurative language. Note the following example from Chapter 5, in which the factory assembly lines mirror the novel's ancestry imagery:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The Foundry is the deepest recess of the Rouge, its molten core, but the Line goes back farther than that. It extends outside to the hills of coal and coke; it goes to the river where freighters dock to unload the ore, at which point the Line becomes the river itself, snaking up to the north woods until it reaches its source, which is the earth itself, the limestone and sandstone therein; and then the Line leads back again, out of substrata to river to freighters and finally to the cranes, shovels, and furnaces where it is turned into molten steel and poured into molds, cooling and hardening into car parts [...].
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Trees:
In the following example of imagery and simile, Cal/lie compares the exhaust stacks at the auto plant to a "grove of trees":
Unlock with LitCharts A+The main building, a fortress of dark brick, was seven stories high, the smokestacks seventeen. Running off it were two chutes topped by water towers. These led to observation decks and to adjoining refineries studded with less impressive stacks. It was like a grove of trees, as if the Rouge’s eight main smokestacks had sown seeds to the wind, and now ten or twenty or fifty smaller trunks were sprouting up in the infertile soil around the plant.
Related Themes:
