"The lake is tricky, the water shifts, the wind swells up quickly; people drown every year, boats loaded topheavy or drunken fishermen running at high speed into deadheads, old pieces of tree waterlogged and partly decayed, floating under the surface, there are a lot of them left over from the logging and the time they raised the lake level. Because of the convolutions it's easy to lose the way if you haven't memorized the landmarks and I watch for them now, dome-shaped hill, point with dead pine, stubble of cut trunks poking up from a shallows, I don't trust Evans."
The narrator first mentions how the lake is dangerous. I feel like this is building up to when her brother's drowning was mentioned. She mentions how people drown every year and logs float under the surface of the water. This was then how she described how her brother was seen by her mother when he died. Irony is used when the narrator describes how easy it is to get lost on the lake. She states that she memorized the landmarks and knows what to look for now, but when it comes to her emotions and love she is very lost. She has a very hard time trusting anyone and this is shown through her statement that she doesn't trust Evans. She is still very upset about her divorce so she has a hard time letting anyone in too close and her best friend has only known her for two months.
Questions:
ReplyDelete1) What role does Anna play in the novel? Or what does Anna represent?
2) Why is it so difficult for the narrator to trust others?
Question 2:
ReplyDeleteI think the narrator has gone through traumatic experiences that lead her to shy away from emotional connections to anyone in her life around her. I would make a guess that most of the trauma she's suffered has been caused by the men in her life and that may be why she has an obvious lack of connection with any of the men in the story (Joe, David, her father, her ex-husband). She also has a disconnect with her past and with anyone that relates to it. She has completely lost her way and is no longer grounded to anything, not even her old hometown. She is an outcast in a sense and therefore has trouble relating to others.
I think the most illuminating metaphor in this book so far has been the one at the bottom of page 28, where she mentions the "frog in a jar" idea (this metaphor is brought up again in later chapters). I feel this illustrates the main character extremely well and goes a great way towards answering your second question. The frog in the jar metaphor implies that she is disconnected, removed from the outside world in an emotional fashion, as if she has a wall of glass between her and everything else. She knows what she's supposed to feel and what others want her to feel but is unable to do so. I think this "lack of trust", therefore, isn't an overt display of distrust, but more like a neutral apathy: she doesn't trust because she doesn't care if she trusts anyone or not. This could be a sign of some emotional overload, like a circuit breaker failing, from some earlier incident that we are shown glimpses of throughout the first portion of the book.
ReplyDeleteI believe that the narrator has a hard time trusting others due to traumatizing events that she has encountered in the past. These events include, losing her mother to cancer, becoming pregnant and having to leave her child and husband because of the way she's been treated, and now her father has vanished from her life. I believe that she has trust issues because everyone that she has trusted in the past has disappeared in her life, and she feels as though she will never find a person that she can depend on. Her way of dealing with this is to put up a "guard" and not tie her emotions to anyone. Therefore, she has become emotionless.
ReplyDeleteI feel as though the narrator at one point put a lot of trust into her family. At the bottom of page 13, the narrator recalls traveling in a canoe down the river. Though one wrong move would have killed them, she was completely calm. This also continues in the recollection of being in wartime, and yet feeling total peace. I believe that when she left her husband and child her parents kind of disowned her. In a short time, everything she had close was gone. That would give anyone trust issues.
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