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Parentification in The Road and The Hunger Games

 

A common motif in stories has to do with the hero having to take on a role that circumstances tossed him into (wizard, symbol of rebellion, jedi, politician, mob boss, super spy, etc.). And then the hero discovers that it is the role they were meant to be all along. The hero must learn to take on a leader role to stand on his or her own. Young Adult novels, especially, are littered with the absent parent or adult figure, both emotionally checked out or oftentimes deceased and completely out of the picture. Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games and the boy from The Roadare two such characters who have single parents who have checked out of their parenting responsibilities and have unconsciously forced their children to take on the role of the adult. Figuring out our path into adulthood, or what we want to be when we grow up, is a question that everyone can relate to. Especially when, like Katniss and the boy, the paths we are placed on aren’t of our own choosing. Many people can relate to taking on responsibilities at too young of an age, which makes this theme so popular. The theme of finding one’s place in the world is expressed in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games through characters who had to shoulder the burden of two very different types of parentification: instrumental and emotional.

Parentification happens within a parent-child relationship when the parent takes on the dependent role and the child has to take on the responsibilities of an adult. There are two types of parentification; instrumental parentification and emotional parentification. According to Lisa M. Hooper, a counselor at The University of Alabama, “Instrumental parentification is the participation in the physical maintenance and sustenance of the family” (1) which differs from emotional parentification, which “is the participation in the socioemotional needs of family members . . . serving as a confidant, companion, or mate-like figure, mediating family conflict, and providing nurturance and support” (Hooper 1). From the Graduate Student Journal of Psychology, Jennifer A. Englehardt states that, “most often, one or both parents are incapacitated, commonly for physical, social, emotional, or economic reasons, and they come to depend upon the child to meet their needs and the needs of the family” (46).  Katniss and the boy certainly fit that criteria. In The Hunger Games, Katniss shows she is a parentified child on a personal level, however all the children in all of the twelve districts are children of parentification as well. After Katniss’s father’s death, she is forced to step into the role of provider and adult for her mother and sister. At the age of eleven, a year before she can enter her name into the drawing for tesserae, she becomes the provider by hunting when her mother emotionally checks out, a “woman who sat by, blank and unreachable, while her children turned to skin and bones” (Collins 8). Calabria Turner from Georgia College and State University puts the parentification of Katniss this way: “While her mother is succumbing to grief, Katniss becomes the provider her family needs, which forces her to bury her emotions of her father’s death and also disregard any childhood innocence pertaining to the perils of adulthood” (38). While Katniss can be identified more with the instrumental parentification as provider/protector, the boy in The Road is an example of emotional parentification.

The man’s entire purpose for not taking his own life and ending it all, is the boy. The man’s constant has become dread. He no longer sustains faith that there are decent humans left. The man believes that “beauty and goodness are things he’d no longer any way to think about” (McCarthy 61). He even tells the boy, “If you died I would want to die too” (McCarthy 11) reinforcing the boy’s emotional role of keeping his father alive. The man is emotionally unable to confide anything to the boy without passing on his fear of other human beings. It is in this sense that the boy has become the parent figure in providing hope for the future with his insistence that there are other “good guys” still in the world. At the beach, the boy wants to write a message in the sand for the good guys to see. The boy asks, “Maybe we could write a letter to the good guys. So if they came along, they’d know we were here” (McCarthy 245), to which the man immediately answers, “What if the bad guys saw it?” (McCarthy 245). The contrast between the man’s disbelief that there really is anyone good left, and the boy’s hope that there is, is significant in who is keeping the emotional strength between them. This swap of emotional roles is explained by Victoria Hoyle, a medieval archives researcher, as: “The boy needs his father to care for him, to socialize and love him, and the father is acutely aware that he needs the boy to give him a purpose, a reason to keep living in an unreasonable, inconceivable world” (1). The boy’s role isn’t so much as the provider, as Katniss Everdeen’s is, but more in providing the emotional stability for his father. He has become the confidant and companion. On a larger scale, the situation both Katniss and boy find themselves in, also forces them to find their roles in the world. For Katniss, the adults in the districts have to rely on their children for food. There is no way for the children not to step into that world.

The Capitol has ensured that the parents in the district are not able to fulfill their adult roles by making the availability of food limited and only children between twelve and eighteen years of age have the means to get more.  “A meager year’s supply of grain and oil for one person” (Collins 13) is given as tesserae if the children put their names in the reaping drawing extra times. Turner explains the toll this takes on the parent-child relationships this way: “Their role, as is any parent’s, is to supply the family with the necessary provisions, and they cannot do this. The Capitol succeeds in making parents feel impotent as each parent watches their children’s chances of dying increase for the sake of obtaining food that will barely sustain the family” (Turner 32).  While Katniss becomes the provider for her mother and sister, and then protector and provider in the arena for Rue and Peeta, the boy in The Road is an example of parentification in more of an emotional role in his relationship with his father. They both move into their roles. Katniss finds her place as the Mockingjay, the symbol of the resistance. The boy also finds his place in the world as a child survivor who, thanks to his emotional parentification with his father, has the emotional maturity to lead the other children into a more hopeful future for mankind. Collins and McCarthy created fascinating characters who had to find their own place in the world. It is relevant that these books were written in a time when the world was reeling from terrorism and war and everyone was trying to find their place in this uncertain new world.

The Hunger Games and The Road were written in the first decade of the 2000s. This was after the events of September 11th and in a decade when school shootings were rampant, and the economy was in its downward spiral. These events combined had an influence on the authors and what they saw in the youth of the nation. Collins admits to have taken her inspiration from a reality TV show where children were competing for money and McCarthy’s idea came on a trip with his young son. The younger generations were not alive during the attacks on their home nation like the generation before who remembered Pearl Harbor and the London air raids. Before then we heard of isolated bombings by crazed radicals, and distant attacks in foreign countries. On September 11, 2001 terrorism shattered our sense of safety, of isolated incidents. The decade became one of The War on Terror and bullied children posting manifestos and walking into schools to kill their classmates. Nowhere was safe. No one was safe. And it was obvious to the younger generation that the adults who couldn’t manage the economy had also failed to keep them safe. The youth, as a whole, took it upon themselves to make the change in a world-wide type of parentification where they began leading the charge against anti-bullying, gun control, responsible climate control, and political accountability. No generation before has been as accepting of others and as vocal about the harm of shaming and bullying. Individually, it is a new world of social media shaming and/or uplifting each other that is an obstacle some might say, or a stepping stone in the path of discovering their place in the world. With fear and becoming adults too soon, it’s a small wonder that The Hunger Gamesand The Road spoke to so many and grew in popularity and commercial success. Collins hit on the unspoken fear of never having any place of real safety and blended it with the popularity of a reality TV spectacle when she wrote The Hunger Games (Engelhardt 46). Likewise, McCormack struck on this same theme as he gazed out of a motel window one quiet night in El Paso and wondered what it would be like in a century where no one is safe and a son and father have only each other to rely on (Johns-Putra 520). Whether he meant to endow the boy with characteristics of a parentified child or it came from his subconscious where he knew the man had no one else to gain emotional support from, it’s difficult to tell. However, the traits of parentification are evident in the boy, which is not necessarily a bad thing. According to Hooper, a study found that “parentification was related to positive outcomes such as high levels of individuation and differentiation from the family system” (1), which is undeniably the case with Katniss and the boy. Each was able to shoulder the “adult” role they were thrust into due to the physical and emotional experience they received through being parentified children.

The theme of discovering one’s role in life has always been a popular theme. Since it is a self-awareness everyone must come to terms with in their own life, it is an idea that everyone can relate to. The Hunger Games and The Road take this theme to new levels as Katniss and the boy must come to the realization of who they are in places of horrific violence and lack, where they were not allowed an innocent childhood and had to take on attributes of adults for themselves and their families. The idea of having to grow up too soon, of lost childhoods, and figuring out who you are, what you stand for, even in a world where your safety can be taken away at any moment accounts for the commercial success of The Hunger Games and The Road.  Whether it was becoming the provider of the family or taking on the role of giving emotional support, Katniss and the boy took on the burden of adulthood and became examples of parentified children who ultimately became the people they were meant to be in Suzanne Collin’s The Hunger Games and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.  

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. New York: Scholastic, Inc., 2008. Print.

Engelhardt, Jennifer A. “The Developmental Implications of Parentification: Effects on Childhood Attachment.” Columbia University. 2012. https://www.tc.columbia.edu/publications/gsjp/gsjp-volumes-archive/gsjp-volume-14-2012/25227_Engelhardt_Parentification.pdf

Hooper, Lisa M. “Defining and Understanding Parentification: Implications for All Counselors.” The University of Alabama. Jan 2008. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281905738_Defining_and_Understanding_Parentification_Implications_for_All_Counselors

Hoyle, Victoria, et al. “Two Views: The Road by Cormac McCarthy.” Strange Horizons. March 2007. http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/two-views-the-road-by-cormac-mccarthy/

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. Vintage Books. 2006.

Turner, Calabria. “A Parthenos in Pop Culture: Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games.” Journal of the Georgia Philological Association, vol. 7, Jan. 2017, pp. 31–44. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=133435701&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Elizabethan Theater: Entertainment or Distraction?

Life during the Elizabethan era had some freedoms that previously weren’t available to the masses. Education was one of these new freedoms. Before, if you weren’t of the nobility, you didn’t get a chance to go to school. Period. Under Elizabeth’s rule, boys, whether from noble families or not, were “educated to be literate members of society”, according to The National Endowment for the Arts. Girls, on the other hand, did not have the expectation to be educated. “By 1600, at least one-third of the male population could read” (Nat End). Religion had a lot to do with this increase as the Puritans funded many of the schools. 
Religion was ever-present in the lives of the Elizabethans. In fact, Queen Elizabeth decreed that everyone must attend worship services of the Church of England of which she was the head. Anyone who didn’t attend, were faced with heavy fines if they couldn’t prove illness. So what if you were Catholic, which had gone out of taste with the monarchy? It wasn’t illegal to be Catholic. It was only illegal to “hold or to attend a Mass” (Nat End). And as far as the theater went, it was not approved by the Puritans. “Puritan leaders and officers of the Church of England considered actors to be of questionable character, and they criticized playwrights for using the stage to disseminate their irreverent opinions” (Nat End). Even Parliament was worried about plays spreading opposing politics and heresy. Yet the Queen loved the theater and protected them. As a compromise to the Puritans, the theaters and performances had to be outside of London, so most of the theaters were built just outside of the city limits. But why was entertainment so important to the Elizabethans?
At a time when work was hard, the death rate was high due to frequent plagues, and more and more people were educated and able to imagine a much broader world beyond their own walls, entertainment was both a distraction and a way to view other people’s lives. It was also a way to poke fun at religion and politics in the guise of making fun of characters who just happened to have similar traits to those they represented. If there was any way to find any kind of entertainment out of life, the Elizabethans were ready for. They went to plays. They held annual fairs. The wealthy held feasts and banquets for anything worth celebrating from a couple getting engaged, to the wedding, to jousting, hawking, and hunting victories. The poor went to dances and tournaments. Troupes came through villages with actors, dancers, jugglers, and animals (Era). They enjoyed dog fighting and bear and bull baiting. And of course, plays, where everyone from the most wealthy and noble to the lowliest was welcome for the price of a ticket, which ranged in the price of admission. 
Plays were also a social affair, which added to the entertainment. The round theaters gave the audience views of not only the stage, but also a view of everyone else in the audience and their behavior. Audience members were not shy about shouting out how they felt about what was going on with the actors on stage. Much like one of today’s sporting events where the spectators react to great catches or fumbled misses, attending a play during the Elizabethan period was a few hours of entertainment on many levels.   Works Cited“Elizabethan Entertainment.” Elizabethan Era. http://www.elizabethan-era.org.uk/eli... Theater.”  National Endowment for the Arts presents Shakespeare in American Communities.  https://web.archive.org/web/201707251... Elizabethan Age.” National Endowment for the Arts presents Shakespeare in American Communities.  https://web.archive.org/web/201707251...

Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

 

Annie Dillard takes a meandering route, moving forward and backward and around again as she writes about how she attempted to search out gifts from the universe in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek . She equates this exploration to how as a child she would leave pennies along the sidewalk near her home for anyone to find, sometimes leaving chalk arrows, or clues for them to see the penny. (Dillard 1) In the same vein of a passerby finding the pennies, she set out to find presents left by the universe in the backyard of her home on Tinker Creek. Dillard explained, “I’ve been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises” (1). Dillard’s view of nature in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is both beautiful and sometimes risky and horrible as she sets about finding how to see nature’s gifts by seeing what isn’t seen by the natural eye, by seeing before understanding, and by seeing with the senses by letting go.

 When Dillard begins trying to see the gifts of the universe, she simply looks, being observant as she walks around Tinker Creek. She knows that if you look for clues like the cut wheat-stalks of grain, she will find mice, or if she looks for caterpillar droppings, she should be able to find the caterpillar (Dillard 1). However in the reflective style that is intertwined with her observations, Dillard also realizes that experts or lovers of certain subjects (like experts of mice or horses) are able to see things that the mere observer misses. At one point an airplane flew overhead and its shadow on the creek bottom gave sight to gifts Dillard could not see outside of the shadow. “At once a black fin slit the pink cloud on the water…I saw hints of hulking and underwater shadows, two pale splashes out of the water, and round ripples rolling close…and out of that violet, a sudden enormous black body arced over the water” (Dillard 4). As she reflects on this, she recalled a time when she saw clouds reflected in the water that she could not see in the sky. She later read the explanation that “polarized light from the sky is very much weakened by perfection, but the light in clouds isn’t polarized. So invisible clouds pass among visible clouds, till all slide over the mountains; so a greater light extinguishes a lesser as though it didn’t exist” (Dillard 4). Dillard admits that although this experience led her to see the beauty of the water, she saw it because she stayed out later than was wise. She could have easily walked into a rattlesnake or other creature. Another time she got so caught up in walking hawks through her binoculars that she nearly staggered off a cliff (Dillard 5). As Dillard sought finding the gifts of nature, she tried to relearn how to see before understanding.

Dillard read a book about the experiences of blind patients who had surgery and could then see. They had no understanding of what they were looking at and so saw the world in an entirely different way. Dillard attempted to recreate what they must have seen but learned that it didn’t work as knowledge of what she is seeing is too ingrained. There was a child that “when her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw ‘the tree with the lights in it’” (Dillard 7). Dillard saw the color-patches the newly sighted did for a while, but could not sustain it. She lamented, “But the color-patches of infancy swelled as meaning filled them; they arrayed themselves in solemn ranks down distance which unrolled and stretched before me like a plain. The moon rocketed away. I live now in a world of shadows that take shape and distance color, a world where space makes a kind of terrible sense…the fluttering patch I saw in my nursery window—silver and green and shapeshifting blue—is gone; a row of Lombardy poplars takes its place, mute, across the distant lawn” (Dillard 8). She wishes that the people who had just received their sight would have been given brushes to paint what they were seeing before understanding took over and then we could see that as well (Dillard 8). But there is another type of seeing, she moves on, seeing by letting go and giving into the senses.

Dillard says that letting go is like going from seeing the world through the lens of a camera, looking one from shot to the next, or letting the camera go and allowing everything in. In one moment she was looking into the creek, not seeing much, when she let go and “blurred my eyes and gazed towards the brim of my hat and saw a new world. I saw the pale white circles roll up, roll up, like the world’s tuning, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling scroll of time. Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water. I was the lip of a fountain the creek filled forever” (Dillard 9). She warns that although wonderful, staying in that sense-filled state can lead to a type of madness as it will “flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness” (Dillard 9). Dillard concludes that with all of her searching that “Seeing is a gift and surprise” (9).

Dillard’s search in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek turns out to be an interesting guide to go about seeking the beauty and sometimes horrors of nature by looking at what isn’t normally seen through the natural eye, by trying to glimpse what might be seen without labeling it with our own understanding, and by using our senses and letting go. What Annie Dillard learned is that “although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought…a gift and a total surprise” (9). Dillard searched for years among the peach trees to see the same light the girl who had been blind once saw, but it was when she wasn’t looking and “was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance” (Dillard 9). Just like finding a penny in an unexpected way, the universe gave Annie Dillard the prize she had been seeking all along.

 

Dillard, Annie. “Seeing.” Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, HarperPerennial, 1974. WayBack Machine, web.archive.org/web/20160702065318/ht...

 

Hamlet: Depression Unchecked Leads to Tragedy

“To be or not to be” (3.1.56) is one of the most famous literary lines in fiction. Even people who have never read William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet have heard this phrase, however many would be surprised to learn that it is a line about the contemplation of suicide. Hamlet may as well have been saying, “To live, or to take my own life?” That was his question. Unfortunately, that same question has been contemplated by many people in the Elizabethan era and throughout the decades to our current time period. That Shakespeare was able to portray characters with issues of depression as well as some of the causes of mental health, demonstrates the brilliance he had of tapping into issues that plagued everyday people. Or perhaps it was his ability to observe people around him and then flesh out their issues into his characters. William Shakespeare’s Hamlet explores mental illness through word play, allusion, and the pressures of family and society’s expectations. 
In regards to hinting about a character’s state of mind, William Shakespeare was very clever with how he played with words. Clues are given of Hamlet’s “melancholy” and building depression as well as the cause of it when Hamlet first comes onto the stage. The first glimpse of Hamlet’s depression is foreshadowed subtly with a word that can be interpreted two ways. At the beginning of the play, right after the marriage of Claudius and Hamlet’s mother, Claudius asks Hamlet why he still looks so sad. “How is it that the clouds still hang on you?” (1.2.66). To which Hamlet answers, “Not so, my lord. I am too much I’ th’ sun” (1.2.67).  There can be two meanings of this, yet both are correct. “Claudius may interpret the word ‘sun’ as celestial, or Hamlet may be referring to ‘son,’ as he is experiencing stress over being a son and the duty which comes with it” (Hall 9). Another play on words has to do with Ophelia and a hint of her upcoming mental struggle when Hamlet sees her reading a book and exclaims, “The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in they orisons” (3.1.97). A beautiful nymph on one hand, who is in prayer on the other hand allude to the causes of her later insanity. Shakespeare had Ophelia holding a book, which was also how the Virgin Mary was often depicted during the Catholic era of England. Then Hamlet seals the allusion to the Virgin Mary in his next breath when he asks her, “Be all my sins remember’d” (3.1.98). While Shakespeare played with the meaning of words to express encroaching insanity, he also utilized allusion to express the mental state of his characters.
Shakespeare revealed Ophelia’s madness to his audience by alluding to what was going on in his society. When Hamlet was written, the Protestant reformation from Catholic beliefs was firmly in place. Earlier female characters of Shakespeare had the option of fleeing to a convent, yet when Hamlet tells Ophelia to go to a nunnery, it is all the more hurtful because it isn’t an option. “With her avenues to both marriage and the female community of a cloister blocked, Ophelia seems to fall by default into madness. Instead of reciting lauds in the company of nuns, Ophelia must voice them alone” (Chapman 113). She drowns “chanting snatches of old lauds/As one incapable of her own distress” (4.7.176-177). By alluding to old Catholic based lauds, which have no place in the time of the play, Shakespeare is showing his audience how Ophelia has fled into her own mind. I see Hamlet as a depressed young man struggling between duties, however Ophelia’s mental illness became more than she could deal with and unable to cope, she retreated. The causes for this are stemmed in the family and social expectations that were firmly placed on both Hamlet and Ophelia. 
When a person is depressed, any kind of stress will seem compounded. For Hamlet, he is already sorrowing over the death of his father and with how quickly his uncle has married Hamlet’s mother. This is a source of his saddened state, however “it is not the death of Hamlet’s father, but the struggle to define the death that is the central problem for Hamlet’s family” (Hall 5). Hamlet is sad, yes, yet it is when the ghost of his father shows up and places upon Hamlet the duty to avenge his death, that Hamlet begins to spiral. “Shakespeare has depicted a man with an acute depressive illness with obsessional features, unable to cope with a heavy responsibility” (Pickering 1). Hamlet falls into a struggle to honor his father’s wishes while not wanting to hurt his mother. “Hamlet contemplates suicide to escape the discourse of sonly duty to exact revenge on Claudius, when he knows the action will destroy his mother, his family, and himself” (Hall 7). Hamlet believes that he has to either kill Claudius or kill himself. He ruminates on this decision throughout the entire play. Hamlet is trapped within the idea of doing his duty as a son for his dead father and in doing what society expects to not destroy himself or his mother to the point that he feels that he has no control to make his own decisions because he is bound by his duty as a son. To make it worse “in Hamlet’s case, what may be perceived as madness may be his way of protesting against the dominant narrative that his father has been forgotten” (Hall 9). Hamlet bemoans the fact that the marriage took place so quickly in the following lines:
Would have mourn’d longer,—married with mine uncle, My father’s brother; but no more like my fatherThan I to Hercules. Within a month?Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tearsHad left the flushing in her galled eyes,She married. O most wicked speed, to postWith such dexterity to incestuous sheets!It is not, nor it cannot come to good.But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue. (1.2.147-155)
Polonius later declares that Hamlet is insane and everybody else starts seeing him that way because Polonius is so resolute about it. He affirms, “Your noble son is mad./Mad call I it, for, to define true madness,/What is’t but to be nothing else but mad?” (2.2.92-94). Everyone believes Polonius’s declaration that Hamlet is insane. This same scenario between one’s duty and what one wishes is echoed with Ophelia.
Ophelia is also trapped between two duties. Her father has asked her not to talk to Hamlet anymore, yet she is in love with Hamlet. She is trapped between what she wants to do, and her duty as a daughter to her father. Hamlet tells Ophelia to go to a nunnery, and he later kills her father. Ophelia “finds herself at a point from which she cannot escape so she appeases all by going mad…losing contact with one’s reality” (Hall 8). “In act 3, Ophelia appears to think that cooperating with her father will help Hamlet’s madness and thus secure her future marriage. What she cannot predict is the fact that Hamlet will read that choice of loyalties as an unforgiveable rejection of him” (Chapman 117). Retreating into madness is the way that Ophelia can satisfy the duties placed upon her by both Hamlet and Polonius. By safely tucking herself away in her mind, she stayed away from Hamlet (as her father required), yet also avoided all men as though she had gone to a nunnery (as Hamlet demanded of her). 
This theme of mental health is common today as many people struggle with conflicting duties and become depressed over it. Some examples put forth by Hall are a gay adolescent who is taught that being gay is not normal, or a career-minded woman with feeling of guilt over not being a homemaker for her family (7). Shakespeare understood the internal conflict between the messages that society says we should do, and what we (being true to ourselves) want to be. There may always be someone like Polonius that states, “he depressed, he needs counseling, he is wrong” with such conviction that the diagnosis is readily accepted by friends and family whether it is entirely accurate. For Hamlet and Ophelia, could the outcome have been different if someone listened to them? If Hamlet’s mother had simply listened to what her son was feeling and given his conflictions some relief, instead of parroting Polonius’s diagnosis of madness, could Hamlet’s sonly duty been assuaged? And what of poor Ophelia? She had no one to turn to. Had Shakespeare written a sympathetic character to give Ophelia a listening ear, or guide her to some sort of herbal anti-depressant of the time, would she not have entered the river? Yet Hamlet is a tragedy, with a tragic ending for all the characters involved. Perhaps the lessons of their tragedy helped people in the Elizabethan time and our current time avoid the same. William Shakespeare plays with words, utilizes allusion to the Protestant Reformation, and the pressures of family and society’s expectations to demonstrate a vivid portrayal of madness in his play Hamlet. 

 Works CitedChapman, Alison A. “Ophelia’s ‘Old Lauds’: Madness and Hagiography in Hamlet.” Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, vol. 20, Jan. 2007, pp. 111-135. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.snhu.edu/login?url=http://sea..., J. Christopher. “A Narrative Case Study of Hamlet and the Cultural Construction of Western Individualism, Diagnosis, and Madness.” Journal of Systemic Therapies, vol. 35, no. 2, June 2016, pp. 1-13. EBSCOhost, doi; 10.1521/jsyt.2016.35.2.1.Pickering, Neil. “Depressive Illness Delayed Hamlet’s revenge” BMJ Journals: Medical Humanities, www.mh.bmj.com/content/28/2/92.fullSh..., William. “Hamlet.” The Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1524/1...
Shakespeare, William. "Hamlet." The Project Gutenberg. www.gutenberg.org/files/1524-h/1524-h... Image: "Hugues Merle (French, 1823-1881), 'Hamlet and Ophelia'" by sofi01 is licensed with CC BY-NC 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...

Hamlet: Insane or Pretending?

There are many levels of mental illness and emotional stress and William Shakespeare deftly portrayed the two young characters in Hamlet in different levels of this mental state, although the cause of stress was similar to both. The focus tends to be aimed at Hamlet as the main protagonist, yet I believe that poor Ophelia had the same dilemma and wasn’t able to handle it as well so sank into full insanity, while Hamlet’s depression didn’t go into quite the same depths. Both of these characters are caught between what they want and what others expect of them. Hamlet’s father shows up as a ghost and demands that if Hamlet is a good son, he will kill Claudius. Claudius is the king and no one, including Hamlet’s mother, wants the new king dead. Plus, Hamlet isn’t sure that Claudius murdered his father, although he is fairly upset that life has just gone on for most people, including his mother, who got remarried as quickly as she could. According to Christopher J. Hall, “what may be perceived as madness may be his way of protesting against the dominant narrative that his father has been forgotten” (Hall 9). Then of course, Ophelia’s father, Polonius tells everyone that Hamlet is insane. Polonius says, “Your noble son is mad./Mad call I it, for, to define true madness,/What is’t but to be nothing else but mad?” (Act Two, Verse Two). Since everyone thinks that Hamlet is mad, he can get away with a lot more crazy behavior and questions if he goes along with. 
Ophelia, on the other hand, is also trapped between being a dutiful daughter and her love for Hamlet. Her father forbids her to speak with Hamlet and she ends up unable to cope with the conflict between them and retreats within her own mind. She “finds herself at a point from which she cannot escape so she appeases all by going mad…losing contact with one’s reality” (Hall 8). She ends up floating peacefully down the river, happily singing old Catholic hymns that have been outlawed by the Protestants so it’s the closest she can get to escaping into a nunnery as Hamlet had told her to do in a moment of anger.  
While looking at Hamlet’s mental state with the comparison of Ophelia’s true insanity right next to it, his ability to question his emotional state “To be or not to be” (Act Three, Verse 1) in many instances throughout the play, show that Hamlet was able to reason and weigh  possible outcomes for any actions he would take. In my opinion, he pretended to be insane in order to gain information of the truth of his father’s death, and he did it well. Was he also suffering emotional trauma and probable depression? Very likely, yet he was far from insane. Works CitedHall, J. Christopher. “A Narrative Case Study of Hamlet and the Cultural Construction of Western Individualism, Diagnosis, and Madness.” Journal of Systemic Therapies, vol. 35, no. 2, June 2016, pp. 1-13. EBSCOhost, doi; 10.1521/jsyt.2016.35.2.1.Shakespeare, William. “Hamlet.” The Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1524/1...
 

Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf wrote To The Lighthouse after living through both the First World War and seeing that a second war was on the horizon. She grew up through the wars and economic depression and saw how everything about cultural, political, and economic life in Britain had vastly changed. “The First World War broke out suddenly in the summer of 1914 and dragged on far longer, and at vastly greater cost, than anyone had dared to predict. In Britain, thousands of young men responded to appeals to join up in defense of nation and ‘civilization,’ and found themselves stuck, in Ezra Pound’s words, ‘eye-deep in hell,’ living in trenches alongside rats and corpses, and measuring their progress and victories in inches. The destruction of the landscape of battle, of human bodies, and of lives was unprecedented and indescribable, and for many writers and artists like Woolf, grouped under the loose term ‘modernist,’ it represented a decisive, irreparable break from the past and a need for new forms of representation in art and literature” (Scutts).  
Woolf herself, took part in the Bloomsbury Group, where she was able to think and discuss concepts freely instead of trying to be a standard of the outdated Victorian ideal woman. To the Lighthouse seems to have been written as a farewell to the Victorian age as the family looks across the sea to the austere Lighthouse that they can only imagine what it is really like. Going to the lighthouse in a way represents emerging “from the period of painful recovery from the war” (Scutts) and for the family it becomes the symbol of healing when they finally cross over the sea to reach it. 
In her introduction in the Everyman’s Library edition, Julia Briggs notes that “the last part of the novel is free from the idealizing presence of Mrs Ramsay and all that she stood for; in the absence of feminine beauty, the eye is now drawn to objects rather than people, to the boat in the bay or the lighthouse itself; and the search for a moment of happiness when life stands still is replaced by the more masculine and end-directed goal of reaching a particular destination (if Mr Ramsay cannot arrive at R, at least he can get to the lighthouse)” (xxii). Getting to the lighthouse for Mr. Ramsay, Cam, and James marks “the final stages in this movement towards forgiveness and acceptance, the emotions that the mourning process aims to induce” (Briggs xxiv). Mr. Ramsey knows that his wife loves the lighthouse and wished to go there. In the beginning of the novel, he sees her staring at “the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst” (Woolf 14). He notes that as she looks across the water she grows “greyer-eyed, that her husband loved” (Woolf 14). At the end of the novel, the lighthouse is described again in an austere view. “There it loomed up, stark and straight, glaring white and black, and one could see the waves breaking in white splinters like smashed glass upon the rocks . . . so it was like that, James thought, the Lighthouse one had seen across the bay all these years; it was a stark tower on a bare rock” (Woolf 231-2). 
It is almost as if what they have been hoping for all this time has been reached. For James, it is when they are almost there that he receives the praise that he has earned for from his father. Cam “knew that this was what James had been wanting, and she knew that now he had got it he was so pleased that he would not look at her or at his father or at any one” (Woolf 235). For the others, according to Julia Briggs, “James and Cam come to see their father not as a tyrant but a sad old man, their sense of pain and anger, in part deflected from Mrs Ramsay to Mr Ramsay, is transformed into a generosity that is releasing and empowering, bringing peace to the children ” (Briggs xxiv).   
It is interesting to note, that the three members of the Ramsay family who make the journey to the lighthouse do so with a parcel to take to the lighthouse keepers, almost as an offering to this new way of life and forgiveness and relationships with each other begin. Nor do we get to see what happens when they step on shore as Mr. Ramsey “rose and stood in the bow of the boat, very straight and tall, for all the world, James thought, as if he were saying: ‘There is no God,’ and Cam thought, as if he were leaping into space, and they both rose to follow him as he sprang, lightly like a young man, holding his parcel, on to the rock” (237). Moving into a new way of living, pulling oneself from the wounds of the past, is like taking a leap with your offerings as the lighthouse has always been there as a guide. The Ramsay family, and I suppose, all of Britain in the modernist era, had to first go through the pain of war and loss to be at a stage when they were ready to go to the lighthouse. Works CitedBriggs, Julia. “Introduction of To the Lighthouse.” To the Lighthouse. Everyman's Library. 1991. Print. Scutts, Joanna. “Historical Context for To the Lighthouse.” Columbia College. https://www.college.columbia.edu/core..., Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Everyman's Library. 1991. Print. Image: "Cuckolds Lighthouse, ME" by hatchski is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

CONHI Chronicle Article

So this was a little article written about me at my day job's newsletter...


GETTING TO KNOW...CLOVER AUTREY
Clover Autrey almost always has a smile on her face, and with good cause. In this past year, she's had two children graduate from University, and she joined them, earning her B.A. in English. She has three insanely adorable grandchildren, Felicity, Shane, and Dani, who light up her life. Clover said that as much as she loves her children (which is a lot), the grandchildren have a special layer in her heart. They don't live nearby, so they enjoy quality time together via videoconferencing.
Clover is an inveterate writer, spanning from fantasy to sweet romances, and her books are available on Amazon and other online outlets. She first realized she wanted to be a writer when she was still quite young, deciding that it must be the best job ever. While she wrote some short stories and poems in her youth, she didn't get started seriously writing until she was in her early 20s. If she could talk to her 20-year-old self now, she'd tell her that it will take a lot of perseverance, but to go for what sheloves. Some of her best friends are writers, and it has been truly wonderful to have a tribe that understands how each other's crazy brains work. They sometimes get stares when they're out in public and get to talking a little too loudly.
When asked about common traps for aspiring writers, Clover said she thinks it's both ego and a lack ofconfidence. Most writers jump into it, believing that writing is easier than it is. Once they realize how much work it takes, and how much there is to learn about the art and skill of storytelling, the ensuing self-doubt can be crushing. You have to really love writing, and you have to have the guts to put your words out there. It helps to join writers and critique groups, as you'll both teach and learn. Don't take the criticism personally--it's necessary to help you refine your craft. At the same time, don't edit so much that you take your heart out of your writing, leaving it almost soulless. Write with emotion. Don't be afraid to be vulnerable. If you hold back and don't let yourself feel it, or if you let your characters off too easily, readers will not feel the connection.
Clover said she's written scenes where she was crying so much she couldn't see what she was typing, and just hoped her fingers were still on the correct keys. Those magical moments make all the hard work worth it, particularly when a reader reaches out to share the emotion and connection felt while reading those passages. 
Clover said that going back to school and working full time comes with a unique set of challenges. You need to be prepared to have no spare time, and your brain cells will be depleted when you finally wind down for the day. It's important to carve out small components of time. Clover used her lunch hours for study and homework, which freed up some other time. Another difficulty was that she was so busy that there wasn't time to be social. The hardest thing, though, was not having sufficient time for writing. She has a profound respect for anyone who is working and going to school. When asked if she was planning to continue her formal education, she was quick to reply that she went back to school for a specific purpose, and at present is not planning on going any further.
Clover Autrey is the most loyal of friends, and truly blesses the lives of everyone she meets. CONHI is incredibly fortunate to have Clover on staff.

A Raisin in the Sun: Literary Elements

 

 

In her play A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry encapsulates the theme of retaining cultural pride and identity of African-Americans while they took risks to achieve the American dream equal to the opportunities that were afforded white Americans, due to economic advantages. Hansberry experienced the turbulent side of integration in the 1930s firsthand, being attacked by white neighbors and forced to move. I feel that the original written play of A Raisin in the Sun casts a harsh light on the cultural theme of retaining or even finding identity more effectively than the original film version through characterization, setting, and tone.  

The differing cultural identities of the struggle that was going on during the time the play was written are depicted through characterization with how each character represents an idea of the way larger groups in society were handling the struggle of the time. Walter Lee Younger as the protagonist character questions throughout the play which of those around him represents the path he wants to step onto for his life. Should he follow his ancestors where freedom and dignity are the only thing like his deceased father? Why can’t he be like George Murchison and get a lucky break with business and become the new conformist dream? Should he duck his head and stay the status quo like the Johnsons? Should he aspire to the dreams of the integrationists like his mother? Or the idealisms of those seeking an African-American identity as Beneatha does? Should he throw his ancestral dignity aside and become a taker like Wiley Harris? The defining moment of Walter’s journey is realized with these words and how they are written in the play. “And my father—(With sudden intensity.) My father almost beat a man to death once because this man called him a bad name or something” (Act 3, 1, 343-4). Even though Sidney Poitier revealed the depth of this inner struggle brilliantly in the film, for me, the written play shows this journey of Walter’s character more strongly. Just like characterization revealed Walter’s and societies’ wrestle with identity, the use of setting also portrays this struggle.   

The identity of being impoverished and wishing for a better life is revealed through setting. The setting of the performed work steps outside of the Youngers’ dingy apartment, showing the outside world that influences Walter Lee as he stands outside the white man’s business world as a chauffeur looking in, and again in the Kitty Kat bar. We also get a look at the new house, the hope of a better life. I personally thought that these scenes took away from the impact that Walter Lee was able to give in the written play when he tells of how it felt to be looking in at the white boys “sitting there turning deals worth millions of dollars” (Act 1, 2, 328). In Act 3 the moving boxes taking up most of the room also dramatize the setting of being on the cusp of entering that new world. The written setting of Act 3 begins with both Walter and Beneatha silently contemplating their plight in separate rooms, but with both seen from the audience. “We see on a line from her brother’s bedroom the sameness of their attitudes” (Act 3, 1, 9). Although the preformed play’s setting was similar to how I envisioned it with the two rooms, small kitchen, and shared bathroom with the neighbors, the gloom and the lighting in the film didn’t capture the atmosphere the written words painted. I do think that the plant, the symbol of the sad wilting life unable to grow to its potential in the apartment was used to greater effect in the film, especially with how the scene showed Beneatha in contemplation of what had befallen her, sitting at the kitchen table just inches from the sad little plant. The setting of the small worn apartment crowded with more people than it could handle in both the written and preformed works greatly enhanced the struggle for identity and wanting something better, as does the tone found throughout the play.

   The tone of A Raisin in the Sun has an underlying hopelessness with small glimmers of faith that things can be better. Act 3 begins with a hopeless demoralizing tone about how wrong was done to the Youngers so there is no hope of a better life. Beneatha says, “while I was sleeping…people went out and took the future right out of my hands! And nobody asked me, nobody consulted me—they just went out and changed my life!” (Act 3, 1, 68-70). Walter Lee mirrors her tone when he cries, “I didn’t make this world! It was give to me this way!” (Act 3,1, 256-7). That tone changes with that glimmer of faith when Asagai enters with his view of taking responsibility of your own dreams when he asks if it was Beneatha’s money, if she had earned it. The tone of the entire play takes a pivotal turn when Asagai says, “isn’t there something wrong in a house—in a world—where all dreams, good or bad, must depend on the death of a man?” (Act 3, 1, 77-8). Most likely due to the social racial climate of the time the film was made, much of Asagai’s wisdom was deleted from the film, which makes the tone of the written play so much more poignant. I believe that Hansberry intentionally directed most of Asagai’s words to her culture that doing something, even if in the long run it may be for your personal good, even when everything is hard and against you, but to take responsibility for your own dreams is better than doing nothing.

Characterization, setting, and tone come together as the final scene ends on a new beginning, moving out of the dingy apartment into a house as the Youngers seek the American dream with dignity. Are they going to find that elusive peace in their new home? That’s not a sure thing, especially with the author, Lorraine Hansberry’s own life experiences of her family moving into a white neighborhood in the 1930s and being forced out. Hansberry knew her characters were not going to have that peaceful happily ever after, yet Walter Lee’s character arc was intact. He had made his choice in who he wanted to be, good or bad, just like Asagai was making his choice, good or bad. What’s more, in following the gifts his ancestor, his father, had given him in his struggles, Walter’s and his generations struggle would make it so his children’s dreams would be closer to them. Setting is used to reveal this choice as Lena looks at the apartment and leaves, only to go back for the plant.  I like how we do not get to see the new house in the written play, how the unknown of even what it looks like adds to the uncertain future, which also is found in the tone that permeated the play which lightens with that glimmer of hope for a better future, yet also retains the solemnity of the unknown and what their choice is getting them into. But in the end, they have made a choice and are stepping out onto their path. They are doing something.

 

Work Cited

Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun. Literature: The Human Experience, edited by Richard Abcarian, et al., Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016, pp. 711-81

Image: "raisins in the sun in drought" by David McSpadden is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Jack London: The Man Who Lived “To Build a Fire”.

 

To Build a Fire is one of those stories that have stuck with me. Decades after the first reading, that image of just sitting down in the snow and letting yourself free to death haunted me. 

Jack London was a doer, a man equipped and willing to take on difficult jobs to provide for his mother and sisters, while he had dreams of being a writer. Young and strong, he had worked as an “oyster pirate, a sealer, and a hobo; had worked in a cannery, a jute mill and a laundry” (Haigh 1) where he was slogging in the steam when a ship brought word of a goldrush in the Klondike. London set out with thousands of others to add gold prospector to his resume.  He had little idea that his experiences in the northern brutal cold would inspire him to write his greatest works. In “To Build a Fire” Jack London pits man’s wisdom, or lack of, against the dangers of nature by fictionalizing experiences he had in the Yukon, through use of fable style writing, and an omniscient detached point of view.

Jack London relied on his own wisdom before he took his first step into the Klondike. He was a young man, twenty-one, with a string of difficult low-earning jobs behind him and looking to make a fortune. When he landed on the Dyea beachhead, three thousand men were already there. Tenderfoots, who had not realized that they were still five hundred miles from the Yukon and that the native porters were charging ridiculous amounts to carry all the supplies needed to survive for a year (McKay and McKay 1). Jack, however, was prepared. He had gotten hold of a miner’s account and studied the geography of the area. According to Brett and Kate McKay, Jack London “knew that the first leg of the journey was a 28-mile uphill hike to Lake Lindeman” (1) and that he would not be able to afford a porter’s high charges but would need to pack all his food and equipment himself.  Wisdom and preparation prevailed for Jack. He had already devised a method beforehand to get up the Chilcoot Pass to divide “his half-ton kit into around a dozen smaller loads, and would take each load a mile, cache it, and then return for another…Jack simply bore down in determination, put one foot in front of the other, and ignored the burn in his legs and back as he carried a half-ton of supplies to the summit, 100 pounds at a time” (McKay and McKay 1). Conversely, in his story “To Build a Fire” the main protagonist does not share in Jack’s wisdom to prepare for the harshness of the Yukon.

The story takes place in the same area that Jack London had traveled where the man turns off of the main trail “that led south five hundred miles to the Chilcoot Pass, Dyea, and salt water; and that led north seventy miles to Dawson” (London 47). Just as the majority of the three thousand men at Dyea beachhead were not prepared and had to turn back before ever starting their journey to the goldrush, the man in “To Build a Fire” did not prepare for his day long journey either, even when he had been given instructions by those who understood the dangers of the land. The man rejected the wisdom of others by first going out on the journey alone, a situation that London also experienced for himself. London had staked a claim in Henderson Creek, and then went to Dawson to register the claim. The hike back by himself turned out to be demanding through the snow just as “winter had thoroughly set in, and there was nothing left to do but ride it out” at his little camp on his claim. According to Brett and Kate McKay, it was this hike through what London called “White Silence” that “he would later draw on to write his best short story, “To Build a Fire” (47). The man in “To Build a Fire” did not prepare in other ways as well. He brought a limited amount of food, only a sandwich which he carried inside his coat so it would not freeze. He did not have the proper facial protection to cover his nose, and his final mistake was that in his rush to build his fire after he got wet, he did not heed the wisdom to build the fire out in the open, but instead built it beneath a snow-laden tree. That final unwise act sealed his fate when the snow fell and put out his fire. Because of London’s actual time in the Yukon and his personal experience with the dangerous aspect of the nature of the place, the setting of “To Build a Fire” is alive with hidden dangers and risks, from the white cold and quiet that a “sharp, explosive crackle” (London 47) of his own spit in the air startles the man, to the moisture of the dog’s breath crystallizing in its muzzle (London 48), to “the bulge of the earth intervened between it and Henderson Creek, where the man walked under a clear sky at noon and cast no shadow” (London 50).  London had experienced all of these aspects and put it in his writing with an economy of words that only someone who had been there could capture. Also during the winter London was in the Yukon, he learned a great deal from the miners he was with to draw on for his stories.

Snowstorms in the winter would last for weeks. The temperature would drop to sixty degrees below zero and everyone would remain inside. Because of his friendly nature, Jack London’s cabin became a place to trade stories and discuss the larger questions of the universe (McKay and McKay 1). According to King Hendricks, Head of the Department of English and Journalism of Utah State University, Jack London wrote that he had “learned to seize upon that which is interesting, to grasp the true romance of things and to understand the people I may be thrown amongst” (10). Hendricks further states that “’To Build a Fire’ is Jack London’s short story masterpiece. It is a masterpiece because of the depth of its irony, and its understanding of human nature, the graphic style of the writing, and the contrast between man’s intelligence and the intuition of the animal” (11). Recounting tales with other miners, old-timers, and the locals of the Klondike while snowbound was a wealth of rich characterization that London had to draw on. However, with the abundance of personalities surrounding him, “To Build a Fire” was written like a fable with a more narrow characterization to convey universal truths and morals.  

While wintering in the cabin at Dawson, London and his frequent visitors would spend “the time trading stories and debating life’s big questions” (McKay and McKay 1) One of these visitors was W. B. Hargrave, who said of London that “he had a mental craving for the truth. He applied one test to religion, to economics, to everything. ‘What is the truth?’ ‘What is just?’ It was with these questions that he confronted the baffling enigma of life” (McKay and McKay 1). With these types of questions in mind, London  wrote “To Build a Fire” in the style of a fable. Some argue that in his earlier works like “To Build a Fire” the fable aspect was done unconsciously, although it remains present. In his article “Jack London: The Problem of Form” Donald Pizer seeks to establish that London “is essentially a writer of fables and parables” (Pizer, Form 3). He explains that fables “seek to establish the validity of a particular moral truth by offering a brief story in which plot, character, and setting are allegorical agents of a paraphrasable moral” (Pizer, Form 3). Fables are universal stories shared for the purpose of explaining morals or lessons. In “To Build a Fire” the lesson conveyed is as simple as this: don’t go out in the harsh wilderness unprepared or nature will blindside you. Or be wise when dealing with nature. The strong and wise win the day. This is a universal theme to every man, so much so that London did not name the character. He is simply known as “the man” and his companion is known only as “the dog” as in most fables where the character is a moral type. Moral types represent ideas such as honesty, fear, or laziness. In this case the man represents ignorance while the dog is instinct, and nature itself represents danger (Pizer, Form 6).  Pizer states that the “success of the story, as in the successful fable, stems from our acceptance of its worldly wisdom while simultaneously admiring the formal devices used to communicate it—in this instance, the ironic disparity between our knowledge of danger and the newcomer’s ignorance of it, and the brevity and clarity of the story’s symbolic shape” (Pizer, Form 8). The moral of the story is stated directly within the story’s third paragraph as the man thinks about being cold and uncomfortable. London writes “it did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man’s frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man’s place in the universe” (London 47). As readers, we see the danger clearly as learners of this moral fable where the unwise newcomer does not see beyond his own unpreparedness. This moral lesson is conveyed to readers exactly as London intended. While writing in the style of a fable, London also places the narration in an uncaring all-knowing viewpoint.

The viewpoint of “To Build a Fire” echoes the cold detachment of the freezing landscape of the Yukon. Written in the third person omniscient point of view, the narrator knows the thoughts and feelings of both the man and the dog, yet also places distance between the reader and characters. The narrator seems cold and almost monotone, like nature who doesn’t care if the man and dog lives or dies. Nature doesn’t care if the fire is built or not. It does nothing to help them, yet also does nothing to harm them either. It is a quiet observer or chronicler of the events, especially in the form of the fable. As nature, the narrator is not invested in the events, except to pass on the moral tale to those who will hear and learn the universal wisdom it is making a point of. In fact, in this story, it shows that the Yukon can be survived. The man did not survive due to his ignorance of how harsh the cold could be after he was warned not to go out alone. He did not follow the wisdom handed down to him. He represented foolishness, yet the dog who represents instinct (or knowledge passed down) did survive. However, at the end, the man does learn from his mistakes. His ignorance has been turned around to wisdom. As death overtakes him, his final thoughts turn to the old-timer who told him not to go out alone. The man says in the only dialog of the entire story, “’You were right, old hoss; you were right.’” (London 57). Unfortunately, the man gained his wisdom too late and this fable becomes one of being a cautionary tale. It is interesting to note that there was an earlier version of “To Build a Fire” that was published in Youth’s Companion six years prior to this version (Hendricks 16). In the original version the man, although still ignoring the wisdom of not going out alone, is named, Tom Vincent, and actually survives when he, with great luck, “came upon another high water lodgement. There were twigs and branches and leaves and grasses, all dry and waiting for fire” (Hendricks 14). It was the second version, written with the fable qualities that launched Jack London into one of the greatest Northern area writers of our time.     

By bringing his own experiences of his time during the goldrush in the Klondike into his story “To Build a Fire” Jack London relayed the universal theme that man’s lack of wisdom has no place in nature. He accomplished this through use of fables and casting the impartial attributes of nature as the narrator. In his article “Jack London’s ‘To Build a Fire’; How Not to Read Naturalist Fiction”, Donald Pizer points out that “the world, under certain conditions, can be an extremely dangerous place. If through ignorance, inexperience, false self-confidence, and the ignoring of what others have learned and told us (all weaknesses shared by the man) we challenge these conditions, we are apt to be destroyed by them” (223). I wonder if London had never rewritten the story where the man dies, if the earlier version would have ever become as beloved a story as the version that stands as a classic today. I think not. King Hendricks points out that “Jack London loved life and he lived it as fully and as completely as any man. He admired men who cling or have clung to life in times of adversity” (18). London made less than five dollars in his gold prospecting, but the insight, knowledge of the setting, and characterization he gained during that short time brought him fame and riches, and we readers are the wealthier for it.

 

 

Works Cited

Haig

HHai, Haight, Ken. “The Spell of the Yukon: Jack London and the Klondike God Rush.” The Literary Traveler, July 13, 2006. www.literarytraveler.com/articles/jack_london_klondike.

Hendr, King. “Jack London: Master Craftsman of the Shorty Story.” USU Faculty Honor Lectures. Paper 29. www.digitalcommons.usu.edu/honor_lectures/29

Lond,on Jack. “To Build a Fire.” Lost Face, edited by David Price, Mills & Boon, Limited, 1919, pp. 47-70. The Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/files/2429/2429-h/2....

McKay, Brett and Kate McKay. “The Life of Jack London as a Case Study in the Power and Perils of Thumos--#7: Into the Klondike.” The Art of Manliness, March 31, 2013.  www.artofmanliness.com/articles/the-life-of-jack-london-as-a-case-study-in-the-power-and-perils-of-thumos-7-into-the-klondike/

Pizer, , Donald. "Jack London: The Problem of Form." Studies in the Literary Imagination, pp. 107–115.

-- "Jack London's 'To Build A Fire': How Not to Read Naturalist Fiction." Philosophy and Literature, vol. 34, no. 1, Apr. 2010, pp. 218-227. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.snhu.edu/login?url=https://se....

Image: "Jack London Territory." by Anita & Greg is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Getting Into Literature: My thoughts on The Book of The Dead

The Book of the Dead by Edwidge Danticat. 
Edwidge Danticat. Image from Wikipedia

Annie's father has lied to her her entire life. Her parents told her he was a prisoner of war, when in fact he was a guard. The theme of coming to realize that your parent isn’t who you always believed him or her to be is a huge adjustment, which is amplified by the fact that the narrator Annie, a Haitian sculptor, went from believing that her father was a victim to knowing that he was actually the tormentor. In not such a dramatic event, I do remember the first time I realized that my father was just a human being. As a child I had placed him on a very tall pedestal and when through an incident that showed me that he was wrong, I remember very well that feeling when I came home and looked at him again. In The Book of the Dead this realization is shown through a tactile object of a sculpture that Annie created that represented the prisoner that she believed her father had been. She bonded over it with the buyer of the sculpture who was also the daughter of a prisoner. The sculpture also represented something to the father. It tangibly showed him the man his daughter believed him to be, which he knew was a lie. He felt ugly, which was why he would not allow pictures of himself either. He was too ugly. Even though in truth he had never been a prisoner, he was in actually a prisoner to his daughter not knowing the truth of who he really was.  Before Annie knows the truth there is a description of the sculpture: “a two-foot high mahogany figure of my father, naked, crouching on the floor, his back arched like the curve of a crescent moon, his downcast eyes fixed on his short stubby fingers and the wide palms of his hands.” After she knows the truth about what he did she looks at her father and describes: “If I were sculpting him, I would make him a praying mantis, crouching motionless, seeming to pray while waiting to strike.” The very first line of this story is also powerful. “My father is gone.” It at first seems that Annie is talking about how her father went missing for hours from the hotel room, but after he reveals the truth of his past, the father she believed him to be really is gone. This line and the theme also play into the title The Book of the Dead, not only for his love and allusions to Egyptian lore, which was something they shared, but the symbolic death of both the daughter and father. It is almost as though they changed places. By finally telling the truth, he was lighter and happier, freed from his prison, while the truth appeared to make Annie fall into her own prison of knowing who her father was and having to deal with it, even letting the lie lay between her and Gabrielle.   The Book of the Dead is a thought-provoking story that we can all relate to even when we don't want to.