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Nathan Price: The Corruption Of America

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Each of the Price sisters exhibits radically different mindsets regarding their religious faith allowing Kingsolver to differentiate between each of the girls. Rachel, the oldest, proves herself to be the stereotypical teenage girl. Obsessed with her appearance, materialism, and petty matters, Rachel simply does not have room for religion. Similar to her father, Rachel is an extremely selfish and arrogant human being. However, unlike Rachel, the second Price sister, Leah, has a strong religious faith and accepts her father’s believes. Leah is naïve in her belief that her father has “seen about everything” (42). However, as life in the Congo takes its course, her initial fate spirals downward dwindling into close to nothing. While her fate may …show more content…

Nathan Price represents a historical attitude. The incidents of the characters actually unveil the much larger incidents of the world. Price’s wife and daughters reveal heavy opinions regarding religion, technology, health, politics and agriculture. The women’s ideas carry these beliefs into the developing world in an arrogant way. Their arrogance is representative of the arrogance of the average people in America. We didn’t make the awful decisions our government imposed on Africa. We also didn’t call for the assassination of Lumumba. We inherit these decisions and are forced to carry them as a part of who we are. Just like the wife and daughters of Nathan Price, we are the innocent bystanders: the captive witnesses of the world. His daughters and wife got pulled into this mess. It’s not his story. It’s theirs. The lack of dimension Kingsolver gives Nathan Pierce dramatically develops her main purpose in writing this book. She wants to magnify his faults making the only picture of Nathan Price the same as the one-dimensional picture the people of the village see. His wife and daughters unveil plenty of information to formulate an adequate explanation for his beliefs and behaviors. When it is finally revealed that Nathan Price has an enormous burden of guilt from his participation in World War II, the reader finally gains insight on where the extreme evangelicalism is coming from. When his company died in the Bataan Death March, Nathan Price felt like a failure. He knew he should have died with them. This feeling causes Nathan to be very hard on himself and as a result, very hard on his daughters as

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