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Get every literary device explanation for The Phantom of the OperaPlus so much more...
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Imagery
Explanation and Analysis—The Opera House:
Although Leroux rarely provides a sweeping panorama of the opera house, he does permit insight into its specific qualities through anecdotes about Erik, Raoul, and Christine. For example, in Chapter 12, Raoul and Christine explore its labyrinthine passageways:
And she would lead him up above the clouds, to the splendid chaos of the upper flies, where she loved to make him giddy by scampering ahead of him along the flying bridges among a thousand ropes fastened to pulleys, windlasses and drums, amidst a veritable aerial forest of masts and spars.
The opera house seems very grand and complex. Christine and Raoul use it to play inventive games; they imagine themselves to be "above the clouds" and in a "veritable aerial forest" of equipment. According to Christine, it also contains imaginary worlds. In Chapter 12, the narrator further describes their so-called travels:
the two of them, seated on some worm-eaten stage property, would listen to tales about the Opera as they had listened long ago, in their childhood, to old Breton legends. Forgotten by successive administrations and untouched by palace coups, these people had lived in the Opera House for countless years and had no recollection of the world outside.
Details like "worm-eaten stage property" give a good sense of the age of the theater. Specific moments in the story with great visual imagery provide useful snapshots of the opera house's appearance; although readers never get a complete description of the entire building, its many parts come to life at various stages of the story.
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