In Tobias Wolfe’s short story “Powder,” starts off with the narrator and his father going on a skiing trip. A bad storm starts brewing but they continue to ski. After they are done skiing they try to drive home but the roads are so bad the police close them down. The father is determined to get his son home in time for dinner or else the mother will make the divorce final and so he calls in a false report to get past the police barricades. The storm highlights the boy’s distrust of his father, as well as his admiration.
For example, at the end of his journey, McCandless decides it was time for him to go home but the frozen river he had crossed had now melted and it made it difficult for him to return. Ultimately, this would lead to occurrences causing his death. This aspect of McCandless journey is what caused people to believe he was mentally ill or had a suicide wish, when it is very possible that neither is true. Chris was simply determined to do what it was he set out to do. When seeing someone else with this drive and determination, for example someone who wants to become a doctor or if McCandless would have committed to becoming a lawyer, people form a type of admiration.
In the story “Hunters in the Snow,” three men, Tub, Kenny, and Frank, are going on a hunting trip. Tub is waiting for Frank and Kenny to pick him up. He had been waiting for an hour in the falling snow Tobias Wolf sets up a good example of setting by telling the reader about how cold it is out on the street. Whenever Kenny and Frank finally show up, they almost run Tub down with their truck. The driver, who turns out to be Kenny, thinks it is really funny while Tub does not quite agree.
Faith wears a cap with pink ribbons which symbolize her mixture of good and evil and also the uncertainty of Smith 2 Brown’s faith. Brown takes his journey to the forest only to look evilness in the face. A man who looks like an older version of Young Goodman Brown greets him ,“you are late (550)”. Brown returns with the answer “Faith kept me back a while (550)”. They continue on the journey discussing Brown’s father and grandfather and how they came through the woods many times.
In “March”, Thomas presents the idea that spring is the sign of hope not just to the persona of the poem, but perhaps to all the soldiers who were fighting, through the use of personification; “That it was lost, too, in the mountains.” This personifies the spring, suggesting that it is lost as if it cannot find its way through the “mountains on mountains of snow and ice in the west.” It could also be suggesting that the persona of the poem is lost in the harsh winter, possibly a metaphor for the war, and he cannot find his way to spring, to the end of the war. This idea that spring is supposed to be a sign of hope is also echoed in “But these things also” as the persona is trying to cling on to any signs of spring, no matter how petty they may be, that are visible in the “grass long-dead that is greyer now”; “and small bird’s dung in splashes of purest white”. This quote shows that the persona has nothing but the symbols of spring that are taken for granted to hold on to as a sign of hope as even though spring has arrived, the war still rages on, “Winter’s not gone” acting as a metaphor for the war. Thomas also presents the birds as a sign of hope in both “March” and “But these things also” through the use of iambs. The iambic pentameter is “March” is energised by the introduction of the thrushes singing.
In the excerpt from Johnny Got His Gun, the author demonstrates the distancing relationship between a father and his son by using point of view, selection of detail and syntax. The point of view in the except is Third-Person Limited with a hint of second person in the beginning, “When you slept inside the tent it seemed always raining outside because the needles from the pine kept falling.” Turns into “Each summer they came to this place which was nine thousand feet high and covered with pine trees and dotted with lakes.” The switch helps the reader feel what the father and son experience while still holding on to the outside perspective. The Third-Person point of view helps to give off a sort of mystery to the story. We only seem to know the son’s mental anguish over telling his father that he wants to ‘hang out’ with someone else. The uses of selection of detail in the story suggests that this period of time is when things are changing.
He is shy and more comfortable alone in the world exploring nature as he does when he skis to the beaver dam. It is Gene who compares the drastic changes an early snow of winter can make at the Devon school to that of war and how Leper is oblivious to it all when he thinks to himself “But Leper stands out for me as the person who was most often and most emphatically taken by surprise, by this and every other shift in our life at Devon” (Knowles 93). Leper’s withdrawal from the world around him is his way of coping with the harsh realities of the war. Although the war is raging all around Leper remains oblivious by escaping and admiring his natural surroundings. In the beginning Leper’s attitude about the war is that it doesn’t affect him.
It is not clearly stated in the essay that White’s father has passed away, but one can infer that he is not able to make this trip to the lake. For example, the author says, “As he buckled the swollen belt suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.” Since the trip to the lake, the author has experienced these moments of being his father and not himself. When going to the farmhouse, the author talks about how the three-track road is now a two-track road. White also says, “For a moment I missed terribly the third alternative.” In my opinion, the third alternative, his father is what he missed. He and his son are the only two tracks remaining.
Kelly Scaife Anna Dickson English 202 22 February 2012 Escaping Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving is the story of a man who goes out into the woods to hunt and escape his nagging wife, Dame Van Winkle. Rip and his dog, Wolf, go into the woods; and while Rip is napping under a tree twenty years has passed. This ended up working in Rip Van Winkle’s favor because before his epic nap he lived constantly scared of what his wife would say next, he wanted to not work and that be acceptable, and when he pieced together that he had slept for twenty years and his wife was no longer alive, he was clearly relieved. It is clear that Rip Van Winkle lived in fear of his wife’s next sentence. Irving states “the unlucky Rip was at length routed by his termagant wife” (407).
Every line that I read brought in waves of memories from the time I spent on the Appalachian Trail (AT) and backpacking trips out west. He starts the poem with the line, “The plains ignore us but the mountains listen”. Back packing through plains or flat grass lands is unlike anything you'll ever experience. To feel the vast openness of the earth is so incredibly energizing. But it is also extremely terrifying because if you did a complete 360 degree turn, you'd see nothing but maybe a mountain range a few dozen miles out and you feel so vulnerable out there.