Waiting, Wishing, Wanting
In "Big-Hearted River: Part One" Nick travels to the town of Seney to camp and escape from the world. Sadly, Nick finds that the town has been burnt to the ground. Nick goes through the woods not as a man but as a returning veteran. The town is a metaphor that everything anbout his home, his life is burnt and abandoned.
One of the most important metaphors in the story are the black grasshoppers. Nick spends a great deal of time observing them. These grasshoppers were not black before the town had erupted in fire but now they are. Nick wonders how long they will remain black. The grasshoppers are evident to be metaphors for Nick and his fellow traumatized soldiers. The grasshoppers as well as the soldiers have been hardened from their past and from which there is no escape.
My question as well as Nick's is how long with the grasshoppers [soldiers] stay black? Will they ever be able to shed the misery of the war and see life as a beautiful thing or will they submit to the darkness and simply wait for the end?
6 comments:
Although I think it's fair to say that Nick is somewhat traumatized from the war (many people are), I don't think you can say that he no longer appreciates life. I think that Nick does have an appreciation for many aspects of it as evident from his trip to the river. He enjoys both the feeling of the ground beneath him and the chance to be out alone in the wilderness. I think this demonstrates that he has not been completely hardened by the war.
I believe that Nick has been greatly traumatized by his experiences in the war, but that he will be able to recover, just as the grasshoppers in the story likely will. The meaning of his trip seems to be to start fresh and shed that traumatic part of his life, in order to recover and become a new and better person.
We all agree that Nick is traumatized by the war at some degree. The grasshoppers do present an excellent metaphor for the broken soldiers returning from the war. I feel that there is another great metaphor in the river though. Nick notices how the fish are able to stay steady near the river bottom even with the huge current pushing against them. This may give Nick hope that even against strong forces you can carry yourself through. Even the smallest creatures in life are able to pull through and survive. I think this is all that Nick needs to help him revive himself.
Even though the grasshoppers have been blackened by the fire, maybe the soot helps them survive. The black grasshoppers will blend in to the burnt earth better than green ones. Perhaps Nick’s experiences through the war did injure him physiologically, but there may be a good side to that coin. The experience, although terrible, has increased his knowledge of the world and he is wiser for it.
That's an interesting point that the grasshoppers being black is perhaps a positive thing. After the town burned, these grasshoppers adapted to their new environment, much like Nick has adapted to his new environment after the war.
When Nick tells the grasshopper to "fly away" I think he is trying to tell it to start over and fly away from perhaps his past or current situation of being different from before. I think that Nick, too, will be ok and will "fly away" from the traumatization of being in war, though some of the blackness will always remain within him.
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