Wilderness Essay

761 Words4 Pages
Wilderness In the short story, Wilderness by Rick deMarinis from 1991, we are introduced to an ordinary man, who undergoes a change from civilized schoolteacher to animalistic savage. In the story Dave Colbert, Rhea and two friends of her are on a trip into the mountains in Montana. Colbert is not a man of nature, while Rhea’s friend Marv Trane is “relentless know-it-all” nature man. When they get out in the wild, Colbert is taken out of his usual comfort zone, which is his job at the school, so at first Colbert is uneasy of this sudden change and these new people, whom he never had met before and only heard of. But the conflict that lays concealed throughout the entire story is Colbert’s inner dispute, whether he would join Marv Trane, who isn’t afraid of anything and intimidates Colbert by openly displaying his manhood without shame, or if he should keep things the way they are. The source to this inner dispute is that Colbert suppresses his manhood an animalistic behavior, because in the ordinary day it is a taboo to show your inner animal. In the end Colbert yields to his animalistic instinct, which makes his survival instinct take control of his actions resulting in the death of Trane. Dave Colbert is a teacher in social studies at a high school; he is “in the throes of a burnout”. He is a paranoid man. His wife Rhea is cautious about his health and sends him “first to counselors and then to doctors”, because something is wrong with him but she don’t know what, they diagnose him as a candidate for “burnout”. At that point he is afraid and scared by the suggestions that he should consider a career change. When they arrive to the northern Rockies, he is afraid of wild animals, and being a place where there is no residents, and not many people know about. Against Marv Trane, Dave Colbert is shy man, who hasn’t released his inner “wild animal”, like Trane
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