Image Study

Caesar

In chapter 13, Henry buys a vicious tiger named Caesar and tries to use it to attract customers to his gas station.  Luke loves it and tries to train it.  It also serves as a school mascot at Tom and Luke’s football games.  Caesar ultimately saves the Wingos’ lives by killing two of the rapists that threaten to kill them and then dies tragically.

Caesar is characterized as scary and vicious.  When he eats one of the seals at the circus, everyone is terrified.  However, he is also described as beautiful, majestic, and powerful.

The tiger is an important element in Luke’s characterization.  When Luke tries to train him in the barn at night, it is the first time we see him display his true passion.  Caesar’s fierceness matches Luke’s passion for nature.

One of the most significant things about Caesar is that he does not belong where he is.  He clearly should be in the wild, and in the circus and in the town he is out of place and unhappy.  Luke is closely connected with the tiger because ultimately, people try to force both of them into places and situations that are unnatural for them.  Caesar becomes a symbol for people having to cope with being in a place they don’t fit in, like Luke, Benji Washington and Mr. Fruit.

Carolina Snow

While the tiger demonstrates ferocity and power, Carolina Snow, the white porpoise, represents another side of nature: its beauty and vulnerability.  Both the tiger and the porpoise are important to Luke’s characterization because Luke loves both sides of nature.

The porpoise is closely connected to the town.  Tom explains that she is a symbol of luck and that as long as she swims in the Colleton River, the residents of Colleton will have good luck.  Everyone in the town recognizes her and loves her, and they all work together to save her when she is threatened.  When the porpoise is finally captured, it means that the town’s luck has lapsed and foreshadows the moving of the town at the end of the novel.

Part of Henry’s characterization involves the porpoise.  When she is taken, we find out that Henry was helping the captors and that they paid him $1000 to betray the porpoise and the entire town, showing that he is selfish and does not have his priorities straight.  His betrayal of the porpoise parallels the way he raises his children: The porpoise is a symbol of luck, happiness, and purity, and just as he helps remove the porpoise from the town, he takes those things away from their childhood.  Henry’s actions in this chapter are also compared to Lila selling the town at the climax of the novel.  Both Henry and Lila are willing to betray the family and their town for selfish reasons.

Colleton

Colleton is a small, rural town that epitomizes the South.  The people all know each other, and most of them are friendly toward each other.  An important part of the characterization of the town is its response to Mr. Fruit, the presumably mentally disabled man who directs traffic where there is a correctly functioning traffic light.  Tom says that “any community can be judged in its humanity or corruption by how it manages to accommodate the Mr. Fruits of the world (208),” and Colleton proves itself to be a genial town by accepting and respecting Mr. Fruit when other towns wouldn’t.

The town is an important image because it is what Tom, Luke, and many others live.  Its destruction at the end of the novel in tragic because of the love so many people had for it.

Conroy also uses to Colleton to establish one of his claims about America: that its top priorities are increasing its size and wealth.  Colleton was destroyed because it didn’t want to change to match those ideals.

The Salt Marshes

“To describe our growing up in the lowcountry of South Carolina, I would have to take you the marsh on a spring day, flush the great blue heron from its silent occupation, scatter marsh hens as we sink to our knees in mud, open you an oyster with a pocketknife and feed it to you from the shell and say, “There.  That taste.  That’s that taste of my childhood (6).”

The marshes are an important part of Tom, Luke, and Savannah’s childhood.  Since they lived on the marsh and their father was a shrimper, the children spent a lot of time outside, whether it was on the boat, swimming in the river, or sitting on the dock.  The came to appreciate a lot about the power of nature, that marshes, and the tides.

When Luke goes to Vietnam, he sees rice paddies that remind him of the salt marshes.  This makes beautiful parts of nature a motif in the novel and shows that they can be found all over the world.  The Wingo children, primarily Luke, love their island and their town not just for sentimental reasons but also for the beauty of nature that they see there.  Conroy shows us that nature connects everyone in the world because it exists everywhere and anyone can appreciate it.