American Born China

The image I have chosen is an image of a man and a monkey walking together in a friendly manner down a path. You can see the monkey’s shoes left behind while they go to their walk under a blue sky with a shiny star. I have chosen this image because it was a happier moment in the book and there weren’t too many of these happy moments. At this point in the book, the monkey has just freed a man from demons with spears. He did this by breaking out of his prison of rocks and saving the man while he was being stabbed. This image is extremely important to the narrative because earlier in the book, the monkey king had ordered that every monkey wears shoes so that they could be more human-like. Because of this, the monkey’s shoes being taken off means that he no longer cares what others think of him and he …show more content…
This is an example of the author using “distance from the reader” by putting the shoes closer to the reader and everything else away from the reader. From this, we can infer that the author doesn’t want us to look at the man and the monkey because they are farther in the distance. Also, the image of the star in the background is just like the North star, which symbolizes a new start and finding your way, just like the monkey is beginning his journey to a new start and finding his way. The author uses visual rhetoric in the size and illumination of the star. Lastly, the size of the mountains and the background compared to the monkey and the man gives me the feeling that their journey will be a long and important one because they seem tiny with everything else big around them. The author here is using the size of images as a visual rhetoric to show the reader how crucial this journey is in order for the monkey to find