Seeing Pink Elephants
The first recorded use of pink elephants as the stereotypical hallucination of the extremely drunk occurs at the beginning of chapter two:
There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants. He is the type that gives rise to the jokes in the funny papers.
This is contrasted to drinkers such as the narrator, who are possessed of imagination and become drunk more in brain than in body. To them, John Barleycorn sends clear visions of the eventual pointlessness of life and love and struggle.
Read more about this topic: John Barleycorn (novel)
Famous quotes containing the words pink and/or elephants:
“Racism as a form of skin worship, and as a sickness and a pathological anxiety for America, is so great, until the poor whites—rather than fighting for jobs or education—fight to remain pink and fight to remain white. And therefore they cannot see an alliance with people that they feel to be inherently inferior.”
—Jesse Jackson (b. 1941)
“Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficulty: elephants and poodles find many things obscure.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)