Anna Karenina
Tolstoy’s tragic heroine is a central character in this non-fiction examination and analysis of the link between words on a page and the image produced in the mind. Her significance arises precisely because the author does not really precisely describe her, yet there seems to be a very universal conceptualization of what she basically looks like.
Charles Dickens
Excerpts from the writings of Charles Dickens to illustrate the vitality of vivid description. Dickens is perhaps the recognized master of masters of descriptive prose—necessary in order to meet the word count requirements for publishing in serial form, it must be noted—and these excerpts serve to underscore the various arguments the author makes to solidly construct and maintain his premise.
Ishmael
One of the most famous opening lines in all of English literature is the short, simple introductory statement made by the first-person narrator of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick: “Call me Ishmael.” The author engages Ishmael to demonstrate how even a character as fundamentally central to a story—one who introduces himself in the opening line and then proceeds to tell story—needs to constantly be reconstructed in the mind. The argument here is that all reading is a mystery and the mystery and the opening line is especially so because the reader is invited to known this Ishmael person in an intimate manner without having been provided any foundational information at all.
