Friday, September 9, 2011
Snow, Music, Death, and White Whales
Hello all, I hope the reading for the weekend is going okay. The reading from Moby Dick is a little challenging, I realize, but I hope you are making some connections to Snow Falling on Cedars and starting to see why I had you read them. "The Dead" may be a little challenging at first, as well, but I think it is a beautiful short story (one of my favorites) in which Gabriel Conroy learns an important lesson. I want us to start thinking across texts with these examples and see if we can perceive how these stories may be in dialogue with one another through the use of symbols (think of some we have covered in How to Read Literature like a Professor if you have trouble). See if you can pick out some "common threads" between Snow Falling and one or both of the other readings and post your thoughts on this thread. If there is anything that is confusing you with any of the texts, feel free to post that, as well, and we can help each other out. See you Monday; have a great weekend.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
-Blog
ReplyDeleteOne of the similarities that I noticed while reading the text we were given over the weekend was the occurrence of snow, or whiteness. That is a detail that was always present in the novel Snow Falling on Cedars as well. I think the writer of Death did this with the purpose of trying to create a tie between two stressful situations that the main character, Gabriel, went through while he saw the snow. Those circumstances were the speech he gave, and the enlightenment to his wife's strong past love. These two situations were similar, because they both had Gabriel second guessing himself and the way people perceive him. Snow can cause unclearness, which is what the character felt. Unclearness is also a detail that the white whale in Moby Dick possessed. By relating the white whale to snow in this way, readers are able to understand the whale's mysterious impression. The whiteness of the whale also resembled a ghost, which made it, again, seem mystifying. Snow Falling on Cedars was a mystery, so I found it appropriately related to these two pieces of text and snow and their connections.
While reading the texts The Dead and Moby Dick, I found them to be parallel to each other by absence. In both absence is represented by whiteness. In the text The Dead, in the ending paragraphs, Gabriel was staring at the falling snow (whiteness), while realizing there was an absence of true love between him and his wife. In Moby Dick, the white whale represented the absence of knowledge of why the whale is white. The whiteness of the whale makes him more mysterious and intriguing. Snow Falling on the Cedars is also parallel to both these texts because there is an absence. Since the weather outside the court room, during the trial, is a snow storm (whiteness); the snow storm represents the absence of the truth of the death of Carl.
ReplyDeleteWow, Kelsey and Hollis, those are both very insightful comments. Your connections are really strong. Whiteness, of course, is traditionally connected with purity and redemption (a quality "white" people have often egregiously conflated with skin color as well). However, Melville does a good job at highlighting some of the negative qualities too, establishing the whale's whiteness as a threatening anomaly, and Ishmael is appalled by the whiteness of the whale. Snow is particularly effective in conveying both whiteness and death, as you both highlight, in both its absence (of color/life) and its unmistakable presence/threat. I look forward to the rest of your comments and our discussion tomorrow. We will also talk about the other obvious connection between Snow Falling and Moby Dick (besides fishing): the name Ishmael.
ReplyDeleteFrom the reading this weekend I found the strongest symbolism for snow and somewhat for whiteness to be a frozen, unwillingness to change. In The Dead Gabriel wanted things to stay the same between himself and Miss Ivors, the hospitable aunts, and let the dead be dead. He wished he and his wife could just live in the happy memories but when he came to grips that his wife loved another, his heart changes and he realized he still loved his wife it started snowing which made me believe he made a new, permanent change sealed with the frozen, unthreatening snow falling on his window (or his "view of the world). Ishmael wished the same thing about his love and like Gabriel snow is falling around him throughout the story. Except unlike Gabriel, when Ishmael has his revelation about the human heart it's like he moved on to a different season entirely instead of being sealed in this one new mode of thinking like the stubborn Gabriel. The lack of snow in the chapter from Moby Dick, I think, is made up by the white monstrosity of a whale Ishmael speaks of. The whale is unchanging in it's habits of natural survival and instinct but it caused serious trials for Ahab and astonishment from Ishmael just as snow does for humans. Also, Moby Dick, much like snow, is indiscriminate and would eat everybody equally (except snow will just freeze everybody not eat).
ReplyDeleteThe main correlation between Snow Falling on Cedars and “The Dead” is that the characters are all lost in their own misguided truths. In Snow Falling on Cedars, the individuals who find themselves in the trial have drawn their own conclusions, which they based off of personal experiences involving Kabuo Miyamoto and Carl Heine. Their experiences and conclusions formed their own version or truth of how the “murder” took place. In “The Death”, Gabriel is lost in his blissful memories from the past forming his own truth, only to discover his wife’s heart belongs to another man. In both stories the imagery of snow falling around them symbolizes each of the characters mistaken thoughts. Their own ideas are fuzzy and confusing, muffling the real truth and leading them down roads that flitter around like falling snowflakes making everything hazy.
ReplyDelete