The imagery of Helen after being shot
Helen gets shot by stray bullets. The narrator begins the presentation of her appearance after being hit as she crouches at the corner of the kitchen holding onto her side. This imagery becomes more pronounced as she lifts her hand from her side from which the ripped skin under her armpits is visible. The description climaxes with her torn white shirt as it becomes more and more soaked in blood. The narrator’s employment of this descriptive language enhances the reader’s conception of the events as they unfold:
“Ma lifted her hand from her side and we saw the skin was ripped off under her armpit. Her white sequined shirt was torn and getting redder by the second.”
The Wonder Woman Imagery
Surviving a bullet is something that the narrator’s mother brags about. She evokes the ideology of being invincible and a superwoman and enhances the imagery of the bullets bouncing off of her as if she were the Wonder Woman. This comparison evokes visual imagery through the sense of familiarity that is developed in relation to the famous Wonder Woman film character.
“Ma forgave him, and joked about how she was like Wonder Woman, bouncing bullets off her.”
Julie Meaney
Julie is high on drugs as she comes in to Kathy’s bedside. The narrator begins her description with a simile that exaggerates her intoxicated state. The reader is thus able to imagine in a visual sense, the extent of her intoxication. The narrator vividly introduces her shaking and crying and emphasizes its violent nature via a simile in which she is compared to a shaking leaf. In this way, Julie’s image becomes more refined in the reader’s subconscious including her death at Carson Beach.
The narrator specifically introduces her via the description: “Julie Meaney came in to Kathy’s bedside a few times, as high as a kite. I couldn’t tell if she was falling apart, shaking like a leaf and crying, for Kathy or for herself. I don’t think she knew either, high as she was. In a few years, Julie would walk into the water at Carson Beach and never come out.”
Coley’s wooden-box couch
Similes play a critical and important role in the presentation of characters as well as events through their comparison to other events or things with which they share similarities. In this way, the use of a simile in comparing the wooden-box couch designed by Coley, a friend of the narrator’s mother, to a coffin is essential in evoking its imagery in the reader’s subconscious and thus enhances the appeal: “He fixed the house up, building new cabinets, shelves, and even a wooden-box couch that I thought looked like a coffin.”
