Sensory imagery is an incredibly important aspect of any well written novel. It is what allows the reader to experience what is going on in the story with more than just an intellectual understanding of the material. Without these sensory details it becomes easy for a reader to dismiss or misunderstand what a character is going through at any point in the story.
An excellent example of both sensory description and imagery is when Laila’s home is destroyed in a rocket attack. The beginning of the scene is of Laila helping bring her family’s belongings out of the house. While on the surface this sounds extraordinarily dull the choice of phrasing and inclusion of sensory details instead creates an experience in the readers mind that is worth having. “Laila kept shuffling between the house and the yard, back and forth.” (Hosseini 192). Hosseini could have just as easily told the readers that she was moving stuff out of the house over and over, instead one can see how she is moving thus enhancing the readers enjoyment of an otherwise rather drab scene. These sensory descriptions increase in intensity and depth as the passage continues. Laila is summoned by Mammy and Hosseni paints a picture with words,
“The sun bright and warm, caught in her greying hair, shown on her thin drawn face. Mammy was wearing the same cobalt blue dress… a youthful dress meant for a young woman, but, for a moment Mammy looked to Laila like an old woman with stringy arms and sunken temples and slow eyes rimmed by darkended circles of weariness, an altogether different creature from the plump, round-faced woman beaming radiantly from those grainy wedding photos.” (192-193).
The reader can feel the sun, they see the colors that surround Laila, they can feel the texture of Mammy’s skin, and for a moment is transported to Afghanistan and is experiencing this moment as if they were standing next to Laila. Perhaps the crowning achievement in this passage in terms of sensory imagery is the explosion itself. Laila’s beautiful daydream of the ocean with its singing sands is slowly transformed into a tinkling, then a whistling, and finally a roar as the missile impacts (193). This entire sequence is masterfully constructed though the use of sensory details which capture the essence of both the calm that Laila feels in her dream and its abrupt end. An end that with the inclusion of only a few additional sensory adjectives is now a horrible nightmare while still somehow manage to maintain a sense of odd macabre beauty. Hosseini breathes life into the explosion as if it were alive with his use of evocative sensory details. “Then a giant roar. Behind her, a flash of white, the ground lurched beneath her feet. Something hot and powerful slammed into her from behind.” (193). Again the reader is transported by way of these details to experience a completely unfamiliar concept, for most people, of being blown up. Hosseini gives just as much attention, detail, and sensory information as a character would get and applies it to an explosion. Juxtaposed next to this horrible event is a sense of elemental beauty. “A big burning chunk of wood whipped by. So did a thousand shards of glass… flipping slowly, end over end, the sunlight catching in each. Tiny beautiful rainbows.” (194). This hauntingly beautiful detail is followed immediately by Laila crashing violently into a wall and the severed limb of her father only identifiable by the scraps of clothing left on it landing in front of her (194). Two visually striking pieces poetically placed next to each other with all the sensory details in each passage highlight the importance of these details. The beauty of the rainbows juxtaposed by the grotesqueness of the bloody chunk of Laila’s father creates a palpable tension and release that can only be crafted with strong sensory details and descriptions. Hosseini does an amazing job throughout his novel with including rich engaging sensory driven imagery. This scene of Laila’s home being destroyed is just one example of how the author can arrange words on a page that causes the audience to feel rather than simply understand what is going on. By using language in this way the reader is compelled to create a much richer and rewarding experience that would be impossible to have without using sensory details. Without imagery to evoke an emotional connection one might as well be reading a textbook for information instead of a novel.