Sunday, December 13, 2009
The rainstorm and river are my brothers...
Oh Emma! I knew you'd make a Pocahontas reference! But in this case I absolutely agree with you. I also found the nature imagery in this section to be particularly beautiful - I loved the image of "blurred boundaries between the earth and the sky." (207) But something I was particularly struck by was Tayo's relationship with living things. Tayo sings to a Mountain Lion and cursers the hunters for trying to kill it. He brushes off snow laden trees with care, so the branches won't break. He seems to truly value every living thing, something I think is a very Native American ideal. As Tayo begins to come to terms with his identity, he begins to see that is the white men who are at fault, because they are the ones destroying the land he cares for so deeply. "He lay there and hated them. Not for what they wanted to do with him, but for what they did to the earth with their machines, and to the animals with their packs of guns and dogs and their guns."(203) In this section Tayo is able to distinguish his feelings towards whites as those of hatred.
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That's a good point, but I wouldn't exactly describe his feelings as hatred- more like resentment or a sort of resigned bitterness. In this section, as in most of the book, Tayo seems to accept white cruelty and casual disregard for land as an established fact of his world- just looking at how naturally his concern about the Cowboy Patrols around Mount Taylor comes to him shows that the mountain is not his, but belongs to Floyd Lee.
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