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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
Key Examples in Snow Falling on Cedars
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Rain Roared:
In one of the narrator's early reflections on the harsh winter climate of San Piedro and its effect on the people who live there, Guterson uses auditory imagery and personification to show how the weather occasionally erases all signs of human presence:
Rain, the spirit of the place, patiently beat down everything man-made. On winter evenings it roared in sheets against the pavements and made Amity Harbor invisible.
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Explanation and Analysis—San Piedro:
This description appears early in Snow Falling on Cedars, as the narrator introduces the island setting of San Piedro. Guterson uses visual imagery in this early passage to present San Piedro as a lushly green and “poetical” place:
Unlock with LitCharts A+San Piedro had too a brand of verdant beauty that inclined its residents toward the poetical. Enormous hills, soft green with cedars, rose and fell in every direction. The island homes were damp and moss covered and lay in solitary fields and vales of alfalfa, feed corn, and strawberries. Haphazard cedar fences lined the careless roads, which slid beneath the shadows of the trees and past the bracken meadows.
Related Themes:
Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis—Child's Balloon:
This moment appears in a flashback to Ishmael’s childhood as he observes his father at work in the pressroom. Guterson uses hyperbole, visual imagery, tactile imagery, and simile in this scene to show Arthur’s darkly casual attitude to the dangers of his profession:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Arthur, who had formed over the years a symbiotic relationship with the machine, ducked in and out inspecting the plates and printing cylinders. He stood mere inches from the clattering rollers, seemingly oblivious to the fact that, as he’d explained to his son, were he caught by a sleeve he’d be instantly popped open like a child’s balloon and splattered across the walls. Even his bones would disappear, this was part of Arthur’s warning, until somebody found them scattered among the stained newsprint on the floor, looking like strips of white confetti.
Related Themes:
Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis—Gory Details:
Guterson uses simile, visual imagery, and gruesome tactile imagery in the following passage to show Horace performing an autopsy on Carl Heine with graphic precision:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Horace inserted a razor into one of his scalpels and poked it into the deceased’s head. He pressed the razor to the bone and guided it through the hair, describing an arc across the top of the deceased’s skull literally from ear to ear. It was a skillful and steady incision, like drawing a curved line with a pencil across the crown of the head, a fluid and graceful curve. In this manner he was able to peel back the dead man’s face as though it were the skin of a grapefruit or an orange and turn his forehead inside out so that it rested against his nose.
Related Themes:
Chapter 8
Explanation and Analysis—Horrible Scarecrow:
This memory appears in a brief flashback to Ishmael's boyhood, where he is doing yardwork to earn money. Guterson uses visual imagery and a simile to portray Mr. Gatewood, Ishmael’s neighbor, as a creepy, frail figure:
Unlock with LitCharts A+In the fall he burned brush piles and raked leaves for Virginia Gatewood, a stick figure at twilight in cloth gloves and a threadbare mackinaw coat ragged at the elbows. The veins in his cheeks were broken and smashed flat and appeared as a sort of blue paste beneath his skin; his Adam’s apple bulged like a toad’s. He looked, to Ishmael, vaguely like an alcoholic scarecrow.
Related Themes:
Chapter 15
Explanation and Analysis—Always Pestering:
The narrative flashes back to the shipboard journey Fujiko and her daughters were forced to take to the Japanese internment camps during the Second World War. Guterson uses auditory imagery in this scene to explain Fujiko’s extreme exhaustion and state of near mental collapse while confined on the ship during the forced relocation of her family:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Fujiko did her best not to give in to her discomfort by speaking of it to her daughters. She did not want them to know that she was suffering inwardly and needed to lie down comfortably somewhere and sleep for a long time. For when she slept at all it was with her hearing tuned to the bluebottle flies always pestering her and to the crying of the Takami baby, who was three weeks old and had a fever. The wailing of this baby ate at her, and she rode with her fingers stuffed inside her ears, but this did not seem to change things. Her sympathy for the baby and for all of the Takamis began to slip as sleep evaded her, and she secretly began to wish for the baby’s death if such a thing could mean silence.
Related Themes:
Chapter 20
Explanation and Analysis—Grown-Up Woman:
The following memory takes place during a flashback to Susan Marie’s teenage years, when she begins to notice and enjoy her changing body. In order to illustrate these changes, the author uses flashback and visual imagery:
Unlock with LitCharts A+She was no longer astonished to look in the mirror and find she had developed the breasts and hips of an attractive, grown-up woman. Her astonishment gave way quickly to happiness about it. There was a roundness and firmness to her, a clean, strong roundness, and her heavy blond hair cast a glow over her shoulders when she wore a bathing suit. Her breasts turned just slightly away from one another and brushed against the insides of her arms when she walked. They were large, and when she got over her embarrassment about them she was able to take pleasure in the fact that boys became unnerved in their presence.
Related Themes:
Chapter 31
Explanation and Analysis—Roared Steadily:
Guterson uses auditory imagery and a paradox in this passage to show that Ishmael feels left behind by time and overwhelmed by the quiet of the snowy world:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Ishmael sat inside for a brief time with his coat wrapped tightly around him. He listened to the world turned silent by the snow; there was absolutely nothing to hear. The silence of the world roared steadily in his ears while he came to recognize that he did not belong here [...] Some much younger people should find this tree, hold to it tightly as their deepest secret, as he and Hatsue had. For them it might stave off what he could not help but see with clarity: that the world was silent and cold and bare and that in this lay its terrible beauty.
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