Rainsford took up his flight again. It was a flight now, a desperate, hopeless flight, that carried him on for some hours. Dusk came, then darkness, and still he pressed on. The ground grew softer under his moccasins; the vegetation ranker, denser; insects bit him savagely. Then, as he stepped forward, his foot sank into the ooze.
- The Most Dangerous Game
The story with the best imagery was The Most Dangerous Game. The above passage engaged almost every sense: the darkening sky he saw, the rank vegetation he smelled, the soft ground beneath his feet and the insects that bit him. The description was effective because it gave us so many details, so as the reader, we knew exactly what Rainsford was thinking and the environment that caused him to think it.
I think what made this passage so effective wasn’t that it appealed to our physical senses, but to our emotions. By describing Rainsford’s fear and his flight, it caused suspense in the reader and folded us more into the story. While I was reading this passage, I could feel Rainsford’s desperation, the terror he was trying hard to suppress. I think what also made this passage successful was that while the author went very in-depth into some of the details, he left others for us to imagine. For example, when he writes about Rainsford’s flight, he doesn’t actually say what Rainsford is doing, but you can imagine the air ripping from his lungs and the slaps of his footsteps against the ground as he runs. The author leaves some of the details to our imagination, and it makes the whole thing seem more real.
