Many authors use a central theme or main idea to unify their works. Sometimes these themes incorporate forms of imagery, such as tactile imagery or visual imagery, to help support their theme, and make this main idea more apparent to the reader. Carol Shields, in her short story "Fifteen Minutes in the Life of Larry Weller", uses this technique to its fullest, as she describes to the reader the lifestyle of her character Larry Weller. In this short story, Shields teaches us that life just happens, we can't plan our futures, and things happen usually by "mistake".
             One gets a taste of this theme in the first line of the opening paragraph, "By mistake Larry Weller took someone else's Harris tweed jacket instead of his own..." (Shields 587). As Larry puts on the jacket and realizes it is someone else's, he decides to keep the jacket for a while, and see what it would be like to live the lifestyle of someone other then himself. Shield's also goes on to describe the ordinary, almost drab, routine of Larry Weller's life. She describes his always-white socks, as a way of telling the reader the main character is not one for change. In fact, the reader begins to understand Larry as the type of person who does not adjust to change, and plans every aspect of his lifestyle.
             Sport socks. You got a choice between a red stripe around
             the top, a blue stripe, or no stripe at all.... [He] wore those socks
             every single day.... White socks went on for a long time in Larry's
             As the story moves forward, Larry becomes comfortable in someone else's jacket, in someone else's life. We learn that many of the things that happened in Larry's life happened by mistake. His career choice came along as a mistake due to the college sending his mother information about the wrong program:
             ...