Snow Falling On Cedars

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Snow Falling on Cedars Essay At the core of representation within a text is a composer’s hope to provoke within the responder thought about specific situations, personalities and ideas. Bias is evident in conflicting perspectives texts as the meaning is conveyed through manipulating either visual or language forms and features that position us to understand the composer’s ideas and purpose. David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars along with Joel Schumacher’s film A Time to Kill and Matt Ottley’s picture book Luke’s Way of Looking all, despite varied textual forms, articulate meaning and a partial perspective of the protagonist in each text. Guterson in Snow Falling on Cedars uses a conventional isolated setting to highlight the ignorance of mankind, depicting a microcosm of the world. By contextualizing his novel into a winter ambience, the season is able to symbolize a turbulent community experiencing conflict. The metaphorical notion that ‘haphazard cedar fences lined the careless roads’ suggests that man against nature’s will has constructed the divisions within society. This representation of nature’s disapproval of the social divide established by man is a reflection of Guterson’s purpose of the text, to draw attention to racial prejudices towards the Japanese before, after and during world war two. The continuing motif of snow represents the chilling burden of hatred that distorts humanity, which is juxtaposed to the continuing motif of cedars, symbolizing nature’s resilience to shake off injustice. By using the setting of winter and the representations of nature as snow and cedars, the responder identifies Guterson’s own opinion, that the social divide amongst the white-Americans and the Japanese is socially immoral. While Guterson uses nature to portray the conflicting perspectives within Snow Falling on Cedars, Ottly intertwines elements of colour,
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