Words related to the five senses--touch, taste, sight, sound, and smell--are what we call images. Writers use imagery to help develop mental pictures in a reader's mind. In Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, one passage containing many great examples of imagery concerns a description of the Negroes' cabins in comparison to the Ewells' home near the dump, which Scout narrates just prior to Bob Ewell's testimony during the trial in Chapter 17.
As Scout observes Ewell take the stand, she reflects on the evidence of his persistent uncleanliness and what his home is like, things that say much about his character. Scout's family has had opportunities to see his home since, each Christmas, the mayor of Maycomb asks Maycomb's citizens to help out the garbage collector by taking their Christmas trees and trash to the county dump themselves. The Ewells live behind the dump and near the Negroes' cabins. Yet, Scout marks there are considerable differences between the Negroes' cabins and the Ewells' home. Scout uses sight imagery in her narration to describe the Negroes' cabins as looking "neat and snug with pale blue smoke rising from the chimneys" (Ch. 17). In contrast, Scout uses sight imagery to describe the Ewells' fence as being made up of odds and ends and rubbish: "bits of tree-limbs, broomsticks and tool shafts, all tipped with rusty hammer-heads, snaggle-toothed rake heads, shovels, axes and grubbing hoes, held on with pieces of barbed wire" (Ch. 17). She further uses sight images to describe the Ewells' yard as being littered with rubbish:
... the remains of a Model-T Ford (on blocks), a discarded dentist's chair, an ancient icebox, plus lesser items: old shoes, worn-out table radios, picture frames, and fruit jars, under which scrawny orange chickens pecked hopefully. (Ch. 17)
Since we can see all of the above details, we know that they are all excellent examples of sight images, or sight words.
Scout further uses fascinating scent images to further distinguish the Negroes from the Ewells in order to portray the type of people the Ewells are. Scout notes that, from the fires inside of the Negroes' cabins, delicious smells arose:
... chicken, bacon frying crisp as the twilight air. Jem and I detected squirrel cooking, but it took an old countryman like Atticus to identify possum and rabbit. (Ch. 17)
Scout further notes that all fragrant scents "vanished when [they] rode back past the Ewell residence," showing us that the Ewells' home smelled of nothing but rubbish, which further shows what kind of people they are.
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