NSW HSC English Standard

Imagery

Imagery is language that appeals to the senses so that the reader pictures, hears, smells, tastes or feels something that is not physically present. Visual imagery is the most common, but a writer who wants a scene to feel lived in usually adds at least one other sense. Compare two versions of the same moment:

The kitchen was old and the tea was hot.

The kitchen smelled of damp wood and burnt toast, and the tea scalded the tip of her tongue before she could taste it.

The second version uses smell, taste and touch, and it also tells the reader something about the character: she is in a hurry, or distracted, or numb. Imagery earns its place when the detail does a job, so the useful question is always what the image suggests beyond the thing it describes.

The senses are named by their adjectives: visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile. Kinaesthetic imagery describes movement and bodily sensation, such as the lurch of a bus or the ache of a long walk. A cluster of images drawn from the same area, such as water, light, weather or illness, builds a motif or an image pattern, and a recurring pattern is often where a text's ideas sit.

Figurative language

Figurative language says one thing in order to mean or suggest another. The main devices are these.

Similes and metaphors in action

A simile keeps the two things apart and invites the reader to notice the comparison; a metaphor fuses them, so the reader accepts the claim and feels its force. "The city was like a machine" is a description. "The city was a machine that ground up the newly arrived" is an argument, because the verb "ground up" carries a judgement about what the city does to people.

When you analyse a metaphor, name both sides of it, then say what qualities pass from one to the other and what attitude the writer is shaping. For the sentence above, the qualities are mechanical, indifferent and destructive, and the attitude is critical of the city.

Symbols and motifs

A symbol is understood from the way a text treats it. An object becomes a symbol when it keeps returning, when characters give it more attention than its use deserves, or when it sits at a turning point. A symbol can hold more than one meaning, and the best readings say which meaning the text emphasises and when it changes. A motif is the repetition itself: a colour, a gesture, a type of weather. A symbol is one thing standing for an idea, while a motif is a pattern that builds across a text.

Irony

Verbal irony is when a speaker says the opposite of what they mean (sarcasm is its harsher form). Situational irony is when events turn out contrary to what was expected. Dramatic irony is when the audience knows something a character does not, which creates tension, pity or humour. Irony is useful in texts about human experience because it shows the distance between how people see themselves and how they are seen.

Analysing imagery well

Quoting a figure and labelling it ("This is a metaphor") shows nothing. A response should do three things in order: identify the image, explain what it makes the reader see or feel, and connect that to the text's idea or the speaker's situation.

Here is a short passage of my own, with a worked reading.

After the funeral the house hummed with kettles. Aunts moved from room to room carrying plates of food like offerings, and my father stood in the hallway, a coat rack nobody could hang anything on.

The domestic detail of "kettles" and "plates" is auditory and visual and sets up a world of ordinary tasks. The simile "like offerings" lifts that routine into something nearly religious, so the food becomes a way of coping with loss. The metaphor of the father as "a coat rack nobody could hang anything on" shows him standing stiff and unused, unable to take on the comfort that others bring, and the clause is slightly comic, which reflects how grief can make a person feel absurd.

Notice that the reading names the sense involved, explains the effect of each device, and ends up in the idea of grief and its rituals. The same method works for any figure in any text.

Tone and imagery together

Imagery shapes tone. Harsh, sharp consonants and imagery of metal and glass produce a cold or hostile mood, while soft imagery of cloth, warmth and light produces tenderness. A shift in the type of imagery within a text usually signals a shift in feeling, so it is worth noticing where a writer moves from natural imagery to mechanical imagery, or from images of confinement to images of open space.

Common mistakes

• Treating every comparison as a metaphor. A comparison with "like" or "as" is a simile.
• Listing devices without effect. "The writer uses a simile, a metaphor and personification" says nothing about the text.
• Calling every image symbolic. Decide whether the object is simply there, or whether the text keeps returning to it.
• Reading imagery in isolation. An image has to be read in the context of the sentence, the speaker and the whole text.