Free Essays,College Free Essays,Free College Essays at Anti Essays

“The Thrill of the Grass” and “The Tax Gatherer”

Two thematically similar Short Stories are “The Thrill of the Grass” by W P Kinsella and “The Tax Gatherer” by Neil Gunn. Religion is the recurring theme in both these Short Stories. I aim to show how religion takes part in the outcome of these two short stories.

“Thrill of the Grass” centres around the events of the 1981 baseball player strike. In recent times, the natural grass pitch of a local baseball team was replaced with an artificial grass surface. A baseball fanatic - who considers baseball as a religion in place of Catholicism or Hinduism or any other religion - breaks into this stadium during the unbearable player strike and conjures a plan to replace the artificial pitch with natural grass along with several other baseball fanatics.

Using imagery frequently throughout the course of “The Thrill of the Grass”, Kinsella is able accurately show that the relaying of the surface is similar to a religious event. The main character of the story meets a rich business man outside the stadium in the early hours of the morning to share his plans for the relaying of the turf. The main character greets the business man with a cardboard pizza box;

“I am carrying a cardboard pizza box, holding it on the upturned palms of my
hands, like an offering.”

Here the writer uses first person narrative to accurately show the character’s actions along with the use of a simile. When the writer uses “like an offering” – the simile - in religious terms this means to sacrifice blood in the form of an animal or human. In this case the grass is acting as a sacrifice of a precious item.

Kinsella religiously describes a delicate clash between a hand and the grass;

“placing his hand, fingers spread wide, on the verdant square, leaving a print
faint as a Veronica.”

The term “faint as a Veronica”...