Stars In Trifles

John Gardner uses symbolism, imagery, and character placement to weave astrology into the very fabric of his novel, Grendel. Each of the twelve chapters corresponds to one of the twelve astrological signs. The author purposely did this and hints to it on page nine with the quote, “cold mechanics of the stars” (Gardner 9). The stars are the guide to the world and all the characters in it in this novel.

I’ve always felt a strange connection to the stars, one that I have never fully understood. I used to believe that it was simply the night itself that appealed to me. There is something so incredibly compelling about it. It’s not the silence, necessarily, but the way that every breath is amplified; it’s not so much the darkness, but the way that the stars light it up. There is an unparalleled magic to them, to the way that they swirl and writhe and explode of their own accord. Although the moon will orbit for eternity and the stars will eventually fade into submission, it is the latter that I admire the most. I would rather die at the hands of my own power and light than live infinitely off of the nectar of somebody else’s.

The Native Americans believed that in the story “Coyote Places The Stars”, a coyote wonders why his wolf brothers look up at the sky every night. Well when the wolves finally tell the coyote that there are animals up in the sky. The coyote shot arrows up into the sky to create a ladder to be able to climb to the stars and visit the animals above. As they climbed to the stars they found two bears roaming the skies. The coyote decided to leave the wolves with the bears and as he climbed down the arrows he took one out at a time so the wolves couldn’t leave. As the coyote looks up at the night sky, he is pleased on how the arrangement of the stars look so he begins to arrange other stars as well, pleased with work he told Meadowlark to tell people who looks at the stars that it was the coyote who has placed the stars, now Meadowlark tells everyone about coyote and the stars ("Native American Legends").

Some nights the sky wept stars that quickly floated and disappeared into the darkness before our wishes could meet them. Under these stars and sky I used to hear stories, but now it seemed as if it was the sky that was telling us a story as its stars fell, violently colliding with each other. The moon hid behind clouds to avoid seeing what was happening” (Beah 80).

In the poem “Of the Threads That Connect the Stars” by Martin Espada, a father and his son are looking up at the night sky, stargazing. Having a father and son moment both go into a conversation, the father asks his son “Did you ever see stars” (1). The poem goes through three generations, the speaker and his father, then the speaker and his son. The father was a former boxer and that was his own understanding of stars, then he had a son (the speaker) that had a rough upbringing, he never got an opportunity to witness "the stars" or “galaxies”, but once he (the speaker) had a son he seen real stars, the planets etc.

She explains that “to save our fish, we lifted them from our skeletoned river beds, / loosed them in our heavens, set them aster—” (10-11). Asteer is a pun, that is a flower and a star. To put flowers for fish and then fish become a star. The milky way is considered as “the pathway that souls follow on their way to the other world” by Northern American Indians (huffingtonpost), so she sees the future and past describing the milky way. She shows these tensions between the time flame and it is like a flow of the

“Night. No one prayed, so that the night would pass quickly. The stars were only sparks of fire which devoured us. Should that fire die out one day, there would be nothing left in the sky but dead stars, dead eyes” ( Wiesel 18).

Throughout our existence, mankind has looked up to the stars with a fantastical wonderment that excites a feeling of the unknown. In order to understand the heavens above us, ancient cultures created grand mythologies utilizing valiant heroes, gods, and life practices and then imbedded these stories into the stars in the form of constellations. One of these cultures is the Navajo Native American tribe that resided in the southwest region of the United States. By viewing these constellations and the myths behind them, we can learn about what they Navajo held scared and how they viewed the world around them.

For many years astronomers and people alike have constantly heard about the observations and records of the Chinese and Europeans. No other culture can provide as much information as that gathered by the Chinese and Europeans, but there are many other cultures that observed and recorded the night sky, one of those being the Native Americans. During the last fifteen to twenty years archaeoastronomers have uncovered much concerning the beliefs and records of Native Americans. Unfortunately, the methods of keeping records of astronomical events were not as straight forward as the Chinese and Europeans. The Native Americans had to use what they could to record what they observed. Their records were found on rock

Emerson's gazing at stars is an example of nightly rediscovering the eternal — making each experience new and continues the theme of progress from the

The thirst for something stable is evident as the children show their awe of the physical world. As an adult explains the stars to Mazie, Olsen writes: "As his words misted into the night and disappeared, she scarcely listened‹only the aura over them of timelessness, of vastness, of eternal things that had

He explained how the Apache can look at the constellations and planets and determine what time it is, even though as the seasons change, so do the times. This was difficult for the author to understand or learn even though she spent a great deal of time at the reservation over many years. She says, 'to be a competent star watcher at Mescalero requires years of watching until the sky becomes as familiar as the back of one's own hand' (99).

It's impossible to teach someone the significance or the act of loving the stars and the ocean but that's what makes navigation without instruments (wayfinding) so beautiful. One can "give the heavens a meaning his own meaning"

The title choice, 'Shooting Stars' is a very effective and ambiguous. The first meaning is that the word ‘Stars’ represents the Jewish symbol in which is The Star of David. Jewish people were forced to wear them on their clothes to mark them out as

(SIP-A) Najmah, when she travels with another family after the death of her mother and baby brother, often uses the stars to physically and mentally guide her. (STEWE-1) When she devises a plan to escape from the family that has protected her, she lies "awake the rest of the night thinking about [her] plan, staring at the stars, and praying for guidance" (131). After she learns about the possibility that her father and brother could be alive, she spends the night praying, completely contrary to the sleep that quickly overtook four pages before. (STEWE-2) After Najmah reaches the camp, she sleeps for “two more nights under the stars” (146). During this time, she talks about how she “must keep her distance” (151) from the family she is traveling with, as she devises a plan that involves leaving them and finding her lost family. (SIP-B) When these stars come in, the readers are provided with a deeper meaning, given through small clues from the author. (STEWE-1) As Najmah stares up at the sky, scheming on what to do, she doesn't pray to Allah, or at least she doesn't say that she is, she prays to the stars. She also clearly states that she “has no intention of staying in Torkhum” (131). but she also knows that she “cannot travel alone to Peshawar” (131). Since she cannot tell the people she is staying with and trusts, Najmah looks for guidance somewhere else. The stars are provided