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Character Analysis: A River Runs Through It

Decent Essays

“‘You know more that that,’ my father said. ‘He was beautiful.’” -p. 61 Beauty has no limit to what it can be used to describe. It can be a book written by Mark Twain or Stephen King. It can be a piece of artwork created by Leonardo DA Vinci or Vincent Van Gogh. It can be a mountain range on the edge of Africa or Europe. It can be a lake located in California or Maine. It can even be a fly fisherman from Missoula, Montana named Paul Maclean. Throughout A River Runs Through It, Paul displays many beautiful characteristics, among those being: artistic, wise, and independent.
Paul is artistic. First of all, while fishing at the Big Blackfoot River, Paul perfectly executed his father’s four-count rhythm. His father would say “it is an art that …show more content…

Firstly, when Norman was having a hard time fishing at the Big Blackfoot River and missed his fish, on page 44, he told him “you can’t catch a big fish in the brush. In fact, I never saw anyone try it before,” but in his basket laid a “couple of gigantic brown tails with gigantic black spots sticking out.” When asked how he caught them, he replied with: “I got them in shallow, open water where there weren't any bushes.” Paul suggests he is wise on the subject of fishing when he says, “big Browns often feed along the edges of a bank in a meadow where grasshoppers and even mice fall in.” Secondly, on page 92-93, Paul explains to Norman why he used one of George’s “No. 2 Yellow Hackles with a feather wing,” to catch a plentiful amount of fish in a shadowy hole. “What’s more obvious on earth than sunshine and shadow, but until I really saw that there were no stoneflies hatching here I didn’t notice that the upper hole where they were hatching was mostly in sunshine and this hole was in shadow. Then I knew, if there were flies in this hole they had to come from the hole above that’s in the sunlight where there’s enough heat to make the hatch.” Paul used a very logical explanation that can only come from experience and wiseness. Lastly, on page 16 when he was fishing with Paul at Big Blackfoot, Norman was having trouble executing the “roll cast” so Paul gave him helpful and enlightening advice. “Instead of retrieving the line straight toward you, bring it in on a diagonal from the downstream side.” Norman then used that information to his advantage and later caught a fish. Paul demonstrates his wisdom but when he gives advice to

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