The recurring image: one thread through a long essay

Anyone who has tried to hold a long essay in their head knows how quickly it comes apart. By the fourth section the reader has been through a childhood, a job, a theory and a long drive. Each part may be fine, and still the whole begins to feel like a shelf of separate objects. An argument can tie them together, and so can a plain chronology. There is a quieter way as well, which is to let one image come back.

The image might be a radio on a kitchen windowsill, a flooded road, a coat that never fitted. It appears early, goes away, and returns when the reader has half forgotten it. Done well, it does structural work without ever announcing the fact. Done badly, it reads like a writer tapping on the glass. Here are some notes on the difference.

What an image can hold that a point cannot

Readers let go of a good deal as they read. They rarely carry the exact steps of an argument from the second page to the twelfth. They do tend to carry what they have seen. If a radio stood on the windowsill on page two, it is still there on page twelve, and when it reappears the reader gets back much of what surrounded it the first time: the room, the mood, the person who switched it on.

That is the practical use of a recurring image. It reaches back across a long stretch of text without recapping it. A sentence of summary tells the reader what they have already read; a returning object lets them remember it for themselves.

Find it in the draft

The weakest recurring images are chosen in advance. A writer decides that an essay on grief will be about the sea, and the sea duly arrives in every section, on schedule. Images brought in this way tend to be large and familiar, and already full of other people’s meanings.

The better ones are usually in the first draft already, unnoticed. Read it through and underline every concrete thing, then look for what turns up more than once without your having planned it. Three kinds are worth a second look:

• Things someone handles. Keys, a tool, a dish that always gets washed last. An object tied to a gesture brings a person with it each time it returns.
• Things that stay put while people change. A tree, a bridge, a stretch of road. These suit essays that cover a long span, because they measure the time passing around them.
• Things that get mended, lost or handed on. These already have a small story of their own, which can run alongside the larger one.

If nothing repeats, go to the strongest scene in the draft and ask what else was in the room. It must really have been there. An object added to a true scene for the sake of the pattern is an invention, and it tends to feel like one.

What makes an image bear the weight

Not every repeated object can carry a whole piece. A useful one tends to have three qualities.

It is ordinary enough to belong. On its first appearance it should simply be part of the scene, with nothing to make the reader suspect a symbol. It is also specific. A bird is a general idea; the heron that stood on the same weir every morning that winter is something a reader can look for next time.

Most of all, it can mean more than one thing. A coat that never fitted may seem at first to be about a father’s expectations, later about thrift, and later still about what a person chooses to keep. An image with a single meaning can only say that meaning again. If you can state what yours stands for in one word, it may be a label, and labels do not grow.

Let it change each time it returns

Repetition alone is only an echo. Each return should do something the last one did not, either because the object has altered or because the reader now sees it differently.

Suppose, as an invented example, an essay about looking after an ageing parent, with that radio on the windowsill. In the first section it is background, on at breakfast as it always was. A few pages later the writer notices that the parent can no longer work the dial, and starts retuning it on each visit. Past the middle comes a morning when the writer lets themselves in and the house is silent. In the last section the radio is in the writer’s own kitchen, still on the same station. Nobody says what it means. The reader has followed a long decline through a small object, and has been spared a good many sentences about loss.

Notice where the largest change falls. If an essay has a turn, as we suggested in Keeping the middle of a long essay moving, that is where the image should shift most, because the reader’s understanding is shifting with it. The final return has its own demands, which we looked at in How to end an essay without summing it up. An ending that comes back to an image works harder when the reader has already watched that image change along the way.

Spacing and restraint

In our reading, three or four appearances are often enough, even in a long piece. A returning image depends on the reader having been away from it, so leave real distance between one appearance and the next. If it turns up in every section, the reader stops rediscovering it and starts waiting for it.

Let it enter by the side door, too. A subordinate clause will often do more than a paragraph of its own: “she had turned the radio off by then” is enough, placed in a sentence that seems to be about something else.

Keep it out of your headings. On this site, longer stories are given a table of contents drawn from their headings, as the features page describes, and a reader will often look through that list before starting. A section called “The radio again” gives away, before the first line, a pattern the reader should have been left to find.

When to take it out

Some signs that an image has begun to work against the piece:

• You explain it. “The radio, I now understood, was the last thing she still looked after.”
• It closes every section. An image that always gets the last line has become a refrain, and the reader will start to hear it coming.
• It appears where it has no business being. If the object has to be carried into a scene by force, the pattern has begun to outrank the truth of the scene.

A simple test is to make a copy of the draft and remove one appearance at a time, reading the passage around each gap. If nothing is lost, that return was doing no work, and it can go. You may also find that the image helped you write the piece without helping anyone read it. In that case it was scaffolding, and scaffolding comes down.

Not every essay needs one of these, and a piece with a strong argument may be better off without it. But when a long draft feels like a shelf of separate things, look for what has been sitting in the background all along. A week after finishing, a reader may have lost the details of your reasoning. Ask them about the essay, though, and they may still tell you about the radio.