“Imitation” is a poignant meeting of a young, foolish woman and a sly painter. The story concludes with a very powerful image of the woman feeling haunted by her experience as a model for a strange, older man. This story has a strong sense of immediacy, as the events all unfold with no real break in time. They go immediately from the park to his car to his house, where he paints her. Despite this, the story’s events seem like they would occur over an extended period of time, in the sense that the two people would meet and he’d give her his contact info and she’d consider it and so on and so forth. But this story completely defies those expectations in favor of immediacy and urgency.
The story’s beginning introduces themes of aesthetic inquiry that recur throughout the story, but at the story’s end, we are ultimately left with the young girl’s terror that has grown inside her since she modeled herself for this man. Why does she feel so disgusted? In the story, she is led to believe she is joining this man for sex, why is modeling for him have such a lasting and unsettling aftertaste?
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