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How can writers help readers to experience scenes as vividly as they themselves do? By using imagery, writers invite readers to experience what a scene looks, sounds, feels, smells, and tastes like.
How can writers help readers to experience scenes as vividly as they themselves do? By using imagery, writers invite readers to experience what a scene looks, sounds, feels, smells, and tastes like.
Imagery - a literary technique which involves using language that appeals to the audience's senses.
Introduction
Introduction
Imagery is an odd name for this technique because it suggests that imagery appeals only to the reader's sense of sight. While this can be true, it is not exclusively the case because the writer can also use imagery to appeal to the reader's sense of sound, touch, smell or taste.
Depending on the desired effect, a skilled writer can use any combination of imagery to help the audience know, for example, how a character is feeling, or the sensation of entering a new location.
The Old Man and the Sea
The Old Man and the Sea
Let's consider at an example of imagery from Ernest Hemingway's novel The Old Man and the Sea
Note in particular how vividly the language appeals to the reader's sense of touch, as an old sailor tries to pull the fish he has been pursuing for days into his boat.
He felt faint again now but he held on the great fish all the strain that he could. I moved him, he thought. Maybe this time I can get him over. Pull, hands, he thought. Hold up, legs. Last for me, head. Last for me. You never went. This time I’ll pull him over.
This use of imagery makes clear just how much strain is being placed on the old sailor, as he wills his hands, legs and head to keep going.
We have all experienced moments when we felt as though our body would give out, but kept going to achieve an important goal. Hemmingway's language helps us to understand what the tired old man is going through, bringing the scene to life in an evocative way.
Spencer Tracy and Felipe Pazos from the film The Old Man and the Sea. 1958. Warner Brothers. Creative Commons.
Types of Imagery
Types of Imagery
Writers can use imagery to appeal to each of the reader's five basic senses: visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory and olfactory.
Visual
Visual
Visual imagery helps the reader to see a scene before them. It can refer to the shapes, colours, and lighting of a scene, along with any important features that they should pay attention to.
Consider the following example from T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and note how the use of visual imagery adds a sense of exotic wonder to the scene.
The bed of the valley was of fine quartz gravel and white sand. Its glitter thrust itself between our eyelids; and the level of the ground seemed to dance as the wind moved the white tips of stubble grass to and fro.
Auditory
Auditory
Auditory imagery helps the reader to hear what is happening in a scene. It can refer to natural sounds such as the wind and animal noises (particularly birds), artificial sounds such as machinery, along with human dialogue and exclamations.
Consider an example from Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, and note how the use of auditory imagery helps to communicate a sense of pleasant stability in the scene:
The bus plows down the highway at a set speed, the tires humming along, never getting any louder or softer.
Tactile (haptic)
Tactile (haptic)
Tactile imagery helps the reader to feel what it would be like to be within a scene. It can refer to temperature (particularly the weather), and also the effects of movement and action.
Consider an example from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and note how the use of tactile imagery helps to communicate the urgency and physicality of the conflict between Jane and the Reed family:
They had got me by this time into the apartment indicated by Mrs. Reed, and had thrust me upon a stool; my impulse was to rise from it like a spring; their two pairs of hands arrested me instantly.
Gustatory
Gustatory
Gustatory imagery helps the reader imagine what something tastes like within a scene. It can refer to flavour, spiciness and the texture of a particular dish.
Consider an example from Kelly Roper's poem Man Versus Pepper, and note how the use of gustatory imagery helps the reader to understand just how much pain the subject is going through as they attempt to swallow a very hot pepper:
One sniff gives a clue of the heat within.
First bite feels like swallowing a lighted blow torch,
And tears stream from his eyes like a flash flood
As the dying ghost pepper delivers its savage revenge.
Olfactory
Olfactory
Olfactory imagery helps the reader imagine what something smells like within a scene. This can be used to evoke powerful moods, as humans can have quite visceral reactions (both positive and negative) to specific scents.
Consider an example from Stephen M Irwin's The Dead Path, and note how the use of olfactory imagery helps the reader to appreciate the significance and power of whatever is approaching the protagonist.
It was a scent as old as the world. It was a hundred aromas of a thousand places. It was the tang of pine needles. It was the musk of sex. It was the muscular rot of mushrooms. It was the spice of oak. Meaty and redolent of soil and bark and herb. It was bats and husks and burrows and moss. It was solid and alive - so alive! And it was close.
Using Imagery
Using Imagery
Imagery is a powerful tool in a writer's arsenal because it allows us to take our readers from wherever they are (be that sitting on a train reading a book, or walking through a park listening to an audiobook) and draw them into an imaginary world that exists in the "theatre of the mind".
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