“The Man Who Met Himself”
Imagery is often a literary tool used to enhance a scene, but rarely does it become legitimately necessary to the plot. This confession to a murder is accomplishes just that. And on top of serving as a confession, it also introduces into the plot the element of the impossible which, of course, has to be explained rationally and credibly eventually. Which, amazingly, it is.
“I began to climb the stairs; and when I was coming up to the midway landing I met myself coming down. I’m not mad! I looked up suddenly as I stepped on to the landing, and I was there – face to face with myself – coming down. I’m not mis- taken! I know what I saw. I know this face, I know the clothes I’m wearing. And the gun! He – I – had the gun, too. So I knew I’d already done it, and she was dead. And I’m going to die, too. When you meet a sending of yourself, you know you’re going to die.”
Medieval Times
The author is most famous for her medieval monk detective Brother Cadfael who appears in a series of very popular novels. Cadfael also occasionally pops up in the author’s short fiction, such as “The Price of Light.” Imagery is especially useful in such stories to bring forth the characters to the future—or send back the reader to the past:
“A hard, cold Christmas it was proving to be, that year of 1135, all bitter black frost and grudging snow, thin and sharp as whips before a withering east wind. The weather had been vicious all the year, and the harvest a disaster. In the villages people shivered and starved, and Brother Oswald the almoner fretted and grieved the more that the alms he had to distribute were not enough to keep all those bodies and souls together.”
Like Mermaids, but Not Mermaids
"I am a Seagull” opens with the narrator recalling tales told by a Scottish aunt. This leads immediately to imagery which situates the mythos of the story, a tale of a legendary creature that sounds sort of like mermaid, but clearly isn’t a mermaid.
“It was she who first told me all the old stories about the seal-wives, those mysterious creatures who came out of the sea and sloughed their skins to become women, like other women to all appearance, but more dangerous and more unobtainable. Almost always they came for love of a mortal man, or, at any rate, some- how let themselves subside with deceptive tameness into a mortal marriage; but al- ways, in the end, it was the sea-half of their dual nature that won them back.”
The Outrage
The opening words of “The Purple Children” inform the reader that the events taking place which is about to be shared were considered an outrage. Furthermore, it is also conveyed that it was an 18-year-old sentry, just arrived to town and barely qualified for his duties, who was to blame for all hell breaking loose. The irony thus commences with imagery which betrays the seeming hyperbolic opening words by following fast upon the set-up: investigating the sound of an innocent child’s voice calling for her lost pussycat:
“As he started into wakefulness with the exaggerated attention which made the walls seem higher and the night darker, a little figure with the light running steps of a child darted towards the gate, and halted with her hands locked upon the bars. He saw how slight she was, and how young, not more than fifteen. Her frock was dark, probably black like so many of them here, and her thin, small wrists issued pale and strange from the sleeves, afloat from her body, as though they could have passed through the bars with ease, and left him helpless behind.”