Imagery and Themes
The first part of the book has the narrator telling Roithamer’s story in the second person; the last part opens with the narrator still nominally telling Roithamer’s story in the second person, but gradually begins to speak directly in Roithamer’s voice, reading portions of his manuscript, where a sort of diary was kept whilst planning and building the Cone. This manuscript was in fact the focus of Roithamer's thousands of corrections, and it becomes apparent that it is being rewritten, “corrected” once again, this time through the voice of the narrator, who begins, ominously, to disappear into the language of the text. Roithamer’s story becomes increasingly obsessive and mad as it describes the construction of the Cone and the death of his sister. It concludes with the rationalisation of suicide, ending with the sentence, “The end is no process. Clearing,” and the narrator’s own voice totally dissolved into the text.
Read more about this topic: Correction (novel)
Famous quotes containing the words imagery and/or themes:
“Poetry presents indivisible wholes of human consciousness, modified and ordered by the stringent requirements of form. Prose, aiming at a definite and concrete goal, generally suppresses everything inessential to its purpose; poetry, existing only to exhibit itself as an aesthetic object, aims only at completeness and perfection of form.”
—Richard Harter Fogle, U.S. critic, educator. The Imagery of Keats and Shelley, ch. 1, University of North Carolina Press (1949)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)