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Examples of Imagery in Literature

This document provides 4 examples of imagery from literature that utilize different senses: 1) Taste is used in One Hundred Years of Solitude to vividly describe a character's eating disorder. 2) Sound is used in "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" to juxtapose the horse's bells with the quiet wind and snow. 3) Sight is used in 1984 to depict a colorless, dreary world under constant surveillance. 4) Smell is used in Perfume to describe the overwhelming stench of 18th century Paris.

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FJ Marzado Sta Maria
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739 views3 pages

Examples of Imagery in Literature

This document provides 4 examples of imagery from literature that utilize different senses: 1) Taste is used in One Hundred Years of Solitude to vividly describe a character's eating disorder. 2) Sound is used in "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" to juxtapose the horse's bells with the quiet wind and snow. 3) Sight is used in 1984 to depict a colorless, dreary world under constant surveillance. 4) Smell is used in Perfume to describe the overwhelming stench of 18th century Paris.

Uploaded by

FJ Marzado Sta Maria
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Examples of Imagery in Literature

Example #1: Taste


On rainy afternoons, embroidering with a group of friends on the begonia
porch, she would lose the thread of the conversation and a tear of nostalgia
would salt her palate when she saw the strips of damp earth and the piles of
mud that the earthworms had pushed up in the garden. Those secret tastes,
defeated in the past by oranges and rhubarb, broke out into an irrepressible
urge when she began to weep. She went back to eating earth. The first time
she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best
cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth in her
mouth. But she persevered, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by
little she was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary
minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of what was the original food.
(One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez)
This passage from Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of
Solitude discusses one of the character’s pica eating disorder. There are many
examples of imagery using the sense of taste, including “a tear would salt her
palate,” “oranges and rhubarb,” and “the taste of primary minerals.” The
imagery in this excerpt makes the experience of an eating disorder much
more vivid and imaginable to the reader.
Example #2: Sound
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake


To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
(“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost)
When most people think of Robert Frost’s famous poem “Stopping by Woods
on a Snowy Evening,” the final refrain comes to mind: “And miles to go before
I sleep.” Yet the short poem contains many imagery examples that are simple
yet set the scene well. In this excerpt, there is a juxtaposition of two sounds:
the bright noise of the horse’s harness bells and the nearly silent sound of
wind and snowflake. While the reader knows that this is a dark night, the
sense of sound makes the scene even more realistic.
Example #3: Sight
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in
the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals,
and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be
no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere.
The black mustachioed face gazed down from every commanding corner.
There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS
WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into
Winston’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner,
flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single
word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the
roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a
curving flight.
(1984 by George Orwell)
One of the central conceits of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984 is
the all-pervasive surveillance of this society. This is a world that has its eyes
constantly open—“Big Brother is watching you” is the motto of the society—
yet the world itself is almost colorless. All that the main character, Winston,
sees is “whirling dust,” “torn paper,” and posters of a “black mustachioed
face” with “dark eyes.” These sensory details contribute to a general feeling
of unease and foreshadow the way in which the world appears more chilling
as the novel goes on.
Example #4: Smell
In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely
conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the
courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings,
the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of
stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the
pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots. The stench of sulfur rose from the
chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the
slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat
and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth,
from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer
very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous
disease.
(Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind)
Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer focuses on a character
who has a very acute sense of smell. The novel, therefore, has numerous
examples of imagery using descriptions of smell. This excerpt comes from the
beginning of the novel where Suskind sets up the general palate of smells in
eighteenth-century Paris. Using these smells as a backdrop, the reader is
better able to understand the importance of the main character’s skill as a
perfumer. The reader is forced to imagine the range of smells in this novel’s
era and setting that no longer assault us on a daily basis.

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