Previous
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
Book 1, Chapter 2: Wildwood (1982-1985)
Explanation and Analysis—Flat, Stale Smoke:
In Chapter 2, Lola uses surprising imagery to describe her mother’s anger in their home:
Her rage filled the house, flat stale smoke. It got into everything, into our hair and our food, like the fallout they talked to us about in school that would one day drift down soft as snow. My brother didn’t know what to do. He stayed in his room, though sometimes he would lamely try to ask me what was going on. Nothing. You can tell me, Lola, he said, and I could only laugh.
Lola compares Beli’s rage to “flat stale smoke” that lingers in everything around them, making itself impossible to remove. The more obvious and expected comparison would be to compare rage to fire. In this metaphor, Beli's anger would burn everything around them down. Instead, here, Beli's rage can coexist with daily life; the house stays standing. But it works its way into every element of Lola and Oscar's lives. Their day-to-day lives are suffused with their mother's inescapable rage.
This imagery represents how generational and political trauma continue to affect Oscar and Lola's family. Their lives are able to continue, but they cannot free themselves of the residual effects of the trauma of Trujillo's dictatorship.
Related Themes:
Book 1, Chapter 3: The Three Heartbreaks of Belicia Cabral (1955-1962)
Explanation and Analysis—The Canefield:
In Chapter 3, Díaz uses vivid imagery to describe the sensory experience of Beli’s beating in the canefield:
As some of you know, canefields are no fucking joke, and even the cleverest of adults can get mazed in their endlessness, only to reappear months later as a cameo of bones. But before Beli lost hope she heard the creature’s voice. She (for it had a woman’s lilt) was singing! [...] Sueño, sueño, sueño, como tú te llamas. She clung unsteadily to the cane, like an anciano clinging to a hammock, and, panting, took her first step, a long dizzy spell, beating back a blackout, and then her next [...] Sometimes she saw the creature’s chabine eyes flashing through the stalks. Yo me llamo sueño de la madrugada.
The detailed imagery here allows readers to embody Beli’s pain. Even though Yunior is imagining how Beli felt as he narrates this, he fully describes the physical experience she had: the confusion of navigating her way out of the canefield while weakened and in pain and the unexpected sounds and glimpses of the mysterious creature.
This imagery is especially significant in the context of Oscar's parallel experience in the canefield, which Yunior narrates later in the novel. By the time that episode appears, readers have already imagined—and may feel like they’ve experienced—the horror and disorientation of being left to die in a canefield. This makes Oscar’s episode even more alarming to read.
This episode also shows the strangeness of being saved from such a state. In her disorientation, Beli understands herself to be saved by a creature that Yunior compares to a mongoose. Like other instances of magical realism in the novel, this creature could be understood both as an instance of magical intervention or as a product of Beli's disorientation.
Related Themes:
