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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 3, Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis—The Summit of Everest:
Near the end of Part 3, Allie Cone uses stark visual imagery to describe her ascent of Everest to a classroom of high school girls. She tells them:
I recall sort of floating over the last overhang and up to the top, and then we were there, with the ground falling away on every side. Such light; the universe purified into light. I wanted to tear off my clothes and let it soak into my skin. [...] Then the visions began, the rainbows looping and dancing in the sky, the radiance pouring down like a waterfall from the sun, and there were angels, the others hadn't been joking.
Part 7, Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—A Garden of Fire:
At the climactic ending of Part 7, the Shaandaar Cafe burns down, and Gibreel saves Saladin from the fire. Rushdie uses elaborate visual imagery full of alliteration to describe the spread of the flames:
Unlock with LitCharts A+And now the buds are blossoming into bushes, they are climbing like creepers up the sides of the towers, they reach out towards their neighbors, forming hedges of multicolored flame. It is like watching a luminous garden, its growth accelerated many thousands of times, a garden blossoming, flourishing, becoming overgrown, tangled, becoming impenetrable, a garden of dense intertwined chimeras, rivaling in its own incandescent fashion the thornwood that sprang up around the palace of the sleeping beauty in another fairy-tale, long ago.
Part 8
Explanation and Analysis—The Arabian Sea:
In Part 8, Rushdie narrates the pilgrimage of Ayesha and her followers to the Arabian Sea. After various trials and obstacles, the group arrives at last. Rushdie describes their arrival with a single long, descriptive sentence rife with imagery:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The tide was in when the Ayesha Pilgrimage marched down an alley beside the Holiday Inn, whose windows were full of the mistresses of film stars using their new polaroid cameras,—when the pilgrims felt the city's asphalt turn gritty and soften into sand,—when they found themselves walking through a thick mulch of rotting coconuts abandoned cigarette packets pony turds non-degradable bottles fruit peelings jellyfish and paper,—[...]—and through the beachcombers, clubmen and families who had come to take the air or make business contacts or scavenge a living from the sand,—and gazed, for the first time in their lives, upon the Arabian Sea.
Related Themes:
