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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
Chapter 11
Explanation and Analysis—Gloomy City:
The narrator uses vivid imagery when describing the unnamed but ancient city where Fernanda del Carpio was born and raised:
Fernanda was a woman who was lost in the world. She had been born and raised in a city six hundred miles away, a gloomy city where on ghostly nights the coaches of the viceroys still rattled through the cobbled streets. Thirty-two belfries tolled a dirge at six in the afternoon. In the manor house, which was paved with tomblike slabs, the sun was never seen. The air had died in the cypresses in the courtyard, in the pale trappings of the bedrooms, in the dripping archways of the garden of perennials.
Here, rich imagery characterizes the “gloomy city” as a melancholy place marked by a clear sense of faded grandeur. Márquez includes visual details, such as the manor house with its “tomblike slabs,” the “pale” decor of its bedrooms, and the “dripping archways” in the garden. So too does he draw from the sense of sound, describing the somber church bells that ring daily, and the carriages which can be heard “rattling through the cobbled streets.” In describing a courtyard in which “the air had died,” the reader gets a sense of the stale, unmoving feeling of the atmosphere in the city. These various forms of imagery create the sense of a city left behind by time.
Explanation and Analysis—Rebeca's Home:
Márquez uses particularly detailed imagery in his description of the home of Rebeca. When Aureliano Triste, one of Aureliano’s 17 sons by different women, decides to stay in Macondo to run an ice-factory, he plans to move into a seemingly abandoned home and goes to investigate it:
The hinges had crumbled with rust, the doors were held up only by clouds of cobwebs, the windows were soldered shut by dampness, and the floor was broken by grass and wildflowers and in the cracks lizards and all manner of vermin had their nests [...] He pushed on the main door with his shoulder and the worm-eaten wooden frame fell down noiselessly amid a dull cataclysm of dust and termite nests. Aureliano Triste stood on the threshold waiting for the dust to clear and then he saw in the center of the room the squalid woman, still dressed in clothing of the past century [...]
Because nobody has heard from Rebeca in decades, the town, and her family, assume that she passed away many years ago. When Aureliano Triste opens the moldering door of the building, he is met with an eerie sight. Here, Márquez uses rich visual imagery in his description of the house, from the “clouds of cobwebs” that seem to hold the door together to the cloud of dust that is kicked up by his entrance. He also invokes the sense of sound, noting that the door “fell down noiselessly amid a dull cataclysm of dust and termite nests.” This imagery characterizes the building as similar to a haunted house.
Related Themes:
