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Post by gnicholson3 on Jul 8, 2024 6:53:39 GMT
“He never really stayed and he never left altogether. He was always in transit” (17).
“Its shelves held mementos of a childhood, two childhoods, two brothers, one now dead, the other servant to a memory of death” (30).
“It’s not a question of belief. Don’t you see? If I believe you, then the world is cockeyed” (55).
These three quotes caught my attention the most while reading the novel. They all feel very existential. The first, our protagonist thinks about First Raise and his drifting experience. His existence seems similar to others we’ve read like Binx and Mike Lovett. They all have similar traits, but this novel feels significant because our protagonist notices First Raise as a drifter. The second, poses the existential question, “What do we live for?” Do we live for the living, the dead, or in Yellow Calf and Teresa’s case both? The third quote goes into more of the existential questions previously posed and explored in our class. If you choose to believe something does the world truly become something else? When that leave of faith is taken is it more than just yourself that changes or is it everything that changes?
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Post by Dr. Nemmers on Jul 8, 2024 16:58:56 GMT
Yes, I took a phrase from that third quote: "This world is cockeyed" as the title of my article on this novel. Though I agree that the others "Servant to a Memory of Death" and "Always in Transit" are both very existentialist as well!
Drifting is another good motif that you've seized on here... I do feel like we've seen this image again and again: a man, alone, walking through a city and disconnected from everyone and everything. It's a very existentialist image!
What this novel does is to consider this from a Native American perspective: not as just an individual, like Binx, but an entire tribe or an entire people. Time and again the characters here stereotype their own kind of "Indians" as drifters, or no-accounts, or drunks, or whatever.
I feel like there's a lot of synecdoche going on here, in which our protagonist may be considered as a representative of his "race" as a whole. How do you stop being in transit, how do you quit being the servant of death, how do you live in a world that's cockeyed?
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Post by gnicholson3 on Jul 10, 2024 8:38:23 GMT
I feel like drifting has been the main character trait that we've observed throughout all the novels. It is interesting that reading this from a Native American perspective our protagonist changes from being one person to a representation of an entire ethnic group; this is similar to Fred in The Man Who Lived Underground. In a way, reading it from this different perspective changes the readers perception of the novel and turns their world "cockeyed."
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Post by mjunious on Jul 10, 2024 14:47:56 GMT
I picked up on this linking theme of "drifting" between the novels as well. Drifting in this novel has more of an ironic twist compared to the others (I think of Mike Lovett finding his way after the war, or Binx Bolling in search of greater purpose in society). The narrator of this novel though, comes from a historically nomadic tribe (a very literal sense of drifting) which in many ways served as one of the defining traits of the Blackfeet Nation. However, he is geographically grounded, but now drifting to find a new defining trait.
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Post by dianarmartinez on Jul 10, 2024 19:04:55 GMT
“He never really stayed and he never left altogether. He was always in transit” (17). “Its shelves held mementos of a childhood, two childhoods, two brothers, one now dead, the other servant to a memory of death” (30). “It’s not a question of belief. Don’t you see? If I believe you, then the world is cockeyed” (55). These three quotes caught my attention the most while reading the novel. They all feel very existential. The first, our protagonist thinks about First Raise and his drifting experience. His existence seems similar to others we’ve read like Binx and Mike Lovett. They all have similar traits, but this novel feels significant because our protagonist notices First Raise as a drifter. The second, poses the existential question, “What do we live for?” Do we live for the living, the dead, or in Yellow Calf and Teresa’s case both? The third quote goes into more of the existential questions previously posed and explored in our class. If you choose to believe something does the world truly become something else? When that leave of faith is taken is it more than just yourself that changes or is it everything that changes? I noticed that as well. It is a recurring theme of drifting in the novel. In this particular novel, the concept has an ironic twist. I agree with the concept of him trying to embody a literal sense of drifting. Despite being geographically settled now, he finds himself drifting once more in search of a new defining trait. |
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