Fish is demonstrating his experience at South Pass, Wyoming to be a thought of excitement prior to reaching the destination with his friend, Del Bene. As he writes more about his experience, it is obvious that South Pass was not pleasurable. The stories of death, the deficiency of water as well as lack of beautiful scenery described in the narrative was profound in sensory details. Therefore, allowing its readers to experience exactly what Peter Fish encountered in his journey. The thesis in this narrative is in a very uncommon position, but this positioning made the story flow much more simple. As described in this week’s lecture, the narrative obviously shifts from specific to general. Additionally, I enjoyed reading the variety of the story,
Gary Paulsen’s fictional character Brian Robeson has to survive a plane crash in the Canadian Wilderness in the time period of the 1980’s. Along with the fictional character, the setting that the book takes place in is also fictional. Although the setting is fictional, the Canadian Wilderness is real. Gary Paulsen created the L-shaped lake and the environment around it in his mind. The animals’ features were all created from his pure imagination, which helped make the book even more fascinating. The environment that Brian Robeson survived in formed a great realistic impression, although it was created from its author’s own imagery.
The dismal scenery imitates the real darkness of the post-apocalyptic world. In the beginning, the “cave” with “wet...walls” immediately foreshadows the constant feeling of isolation and the persistence of cold, rainy weather. The amount of time “tolling in the silence the minutes...the hours...the days…and the years without cease” gives a sense of the never-ending search for asylum in the hostile, ashy planet. The man and the boy have the main goal—a distraction from accepting their fate—to reach the ocean—the minute possibility of a better life—in which they never give up despite the disastrous environment encouraging them to lose faith. However, the “black and
In Carver’s short story, “So Much Water So Close to Home,” three men go to Naches River for a fishing trip and encounter a dead young woman in the river. Aware that the corpse is in the river, they continue on with their fishing trip, not reporting it until they travel back home. Carver illustrates the story through the eyes of Claire, the wife of the fisher. Carver depicts the differences in male and female roles of a marriage and their psychological similarities, associated with why there was a need to travel to further waters, when there is “So Much Water So Close to Home.”
“Homewaters of the Mind”, written by Holly Morris, is a personal narrative from an anthology named Another Wilderness. The narrator starts her story with details of an early morning and preparation for fishing. She then reveals a glimpse of her past, which explains her hobby, fishing, and a sense of disconnection from her father. Shifting back to present day, she struggles with fishing, prompting her to contemplate and admire the scenery. The narrative ends with the author wanting to reconnect with her father. The narrator masterfully utilizes this one fishing experience to illustrate the influence of nature and time on her mind.
Initially Mai holds a negative perspective in “Mai closed her eyes and tried to recall her father's stories— but they rang shallow against the dense roaring slabs of water she'd just seen.” The hydrographia personifies the natural elements creating a pathetic fallacy, which reflects Mai’s initially pessimistic attitude as her hope is crushed by the harsh reality of her experiences on the boat. However, this provocative experience catalyses a transformed perception, as upon reaching the shore she thinks: “The boat would land - they would all land.” The epistrophe of “land” and high modality of “would” shows her renewed hopeful perspective, which would not have been possible without physically experiencing the harshness of being on the boat. Thus, the ability for discoveries to be far-reaching and transformative is seen through these provocative and confronting external experiences that transform individual perceptions.
After passing through the rugged ocean, Howland and his shipmates had no friends to welcome them. No houses or towns to repair when feeling down. As summer coming to a close, the weather was brutal, the whole country was full of woods, in which all represented a terrible
In both Mark Twain’s “Two Ways of Seeing a River” and Charles Yale Harrison “In the Trenches,” the authors use elaborate imagery to enhance the reader’s perception of their autobiographical narratives. The descriptive language allows Twain to illustrate an image of the once lustrous river in the reader’s mind while it allows Harrison to immerse the reader in the gruesome reality of the trenches. Both authors effectively use sensory imagery to describe their surroundings; however, they use different approaches. Twain creates visual images in the reader’s mind whereas Harrison uses all the senses to augment the reader’s imagination.
Much as these are both related to water, they differ greatly in their impact on societies - while one brings hope and life to weary travelers, the other brings struggle accompanied by death. Throughout most of literary history, writers have explored this idea of poly-indicative-identity, whether that be with the vast depthness of water or some other symbol, and William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying is no exception to this idea. From rivers to the fish that inhabit them, As I Lay Dying is composed with a symphony of different symbols, however, one of the more persistent ones is that of the river. By incorporating certain aspects of the Yoknapatawpha River, Faulkner is able to allow the work to flow more smoothly, more easily incorporate ideas about the themes of death and barriers, as well as enhance the characterization of certain figures.
Virgina Woolfe’s colorful diction paints vivid images of her fishing experience with phrases such as “little leaping tug” and “white twisting fish.” With vibrant imagery, Woolfe recalls the dazzling, exciting moments of the times she went fishing during her youth. However, her dad’s dislike of fishing causes her to change her mind and gradually pull away from the sport. Even though Woolfe no longer desires to fish, the memory of the thrill and excitement she felt during those moments remains. Woolfe asserts that through vivid memories of experiences such as these, even ephemeral ones, people can understand each other’s feelings without having experienced the exact same thing in the exact same way; all people need to be able to conjure up
“Once More By the Lake” is an informative short story featuring a man who seems to feel as though he is losing his identity. As a parent, he doesn’t realize that as time passes by his family’s orientation is changing and, as a result, seems to lose himself in time as his surroundings and his son’s actions remind him of himself. Nonetheless, throughout the story, the author uses great detail to put the main character’s feelings on display by using experiences and emotions that are relatable to the reader. The childlike mannerisms and impressive attention to detail exhibited in the essay show how the narrator sees himself and showcases the author’s use of imagery. Revisiting his childhood lakehouse brought past memories to the surface which, over time, shows the main character’s emotional ties to the lake. In fact, in the story, the narrator says, “It was the arrival of this fly that convinced me beyond a doubt that everything was as it always had been, that the years were a mirage and there had been no years” (White 2). Throughout the story, White challenges the reader's mind by describing his situation to the reader and unintentionally drawing from them the conclusion that life as one knows it is destined to change at any given time, including one’s
The story of E. B. White in his work Once More to the Lake, is an essay about how he returns to his beloved lake camp in Maine as an older man with his son. At this lake, he has all of his favorite childhood memories stored and wanted his son to experience the same things he did. Nearly everything was the same, expect one thing. The change in technology was a clear threat to the memory he had of that place. When he was a kid, he remembered how all the boats motors that traveled the lake, “were inboard; and when they were at a little distance, the noise they made was a sedative, an ingredient of summer sleep” (White, 462).
The world of Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” exists through the mostly unemotional eyes of the character Nick. Stemming from his reactions and the suppression of some of his feelings, the reader gets a sense of how Nick is living in a temporary escape from society and his troubles in life. Despite the disaster that befell the town of Seney, this tale remains one of an optimistic ideal because of the various themes of survival and the continuation of life. Although Seney itself is a wasteland, the pine plain and the campsite could easily be seen as an Eden, lush with life and ripe with the survival of nature.
“Big Two Hearted River”, a semi-autobiographical short story by Ernest Hemingway, is a story about the main character, Nick, returning to Big Two Hearted River in order to recover from his inner wounds. Nick Adams goes on a journey alone in nature for a therapeutic purpose as he suffers from PTSD. However, Hemingway purposely avoided any direct discussion regarding to Nick’s mental wounds. The absence of the discussion is contributed by Hemingway’s writing style, the Iceberg principle. Hemingway focuses explicitly on what occurs on the surface without mentioning actual theme. This indicates that the theme of self-healing cannot be uncovered by simply looking at the text itself. In order to comprehend the actual theme of the story, the character development of Nick must be examined. This is possible since Nick Adams is a recurring character of Hemingway’s stories. The two preceding stories of “Big Two Hearted River”, “Now I lay me” and “A Way you’ll Never Be”, directly discusses Nick’s suffering from shell-shock and how he comforts himself by returning to Big Two Hearted river in his mind. The two short stories will be analyzed and connected to “Big Two Hearted River” in the essay first. This will provide a strong understanding of Nick’s psyche and the reason behind his return to nature. Then, “Big Two Hearted River” the short story itself will be carefully analyzed.
In the passage “Two Ways of Seeing a River,” author Mark Twain attempts to share the feelings of loss he experienced after he was disillusioned to the beauty of the Mississippi River. Twain was a famous Nineteenth century author who had previously worked as a steamboat captain and who grew up along the river. The organization of the paragraphs in relation to each other is linear, and the content of each paragraph is dominated by a different rhetorical device.