Aria Beth Sloss One North Analysis

An Expedition of Individualism [1] North by Aria Beth Sloss is a search for the true definition of love between the conflict of unity and individualism. Sloss depicts the father as obsessed with adventuring to the North Pole in a balloon while the mother is stuck between a contradiction of loneliness and independence. The mother finally learns to let go as she realizes that love is not to lay claim to another person. Sloss skillfully uses the iceberg in the beginning as an implication for the complexity of love, showing that though “the impulse is to lay claim to each new fragment of the unknown”, in this case love, one can drift apart from another person unavoidably “as they please” (1). Love can “form and break so easily” just like

Compared to the father’s internal craziness, the description of the mother is far more reserved and composed – a contrast of movement and stillness. While the father has a mind vibrating “like a plucked string”, the mother “lies there in the dark” and “counts the minutes as they pass” (12). While he expresses his passion with a cycle of “exhilaration, exhaustion, frustration”, she tries to suppress her disappointment and sadness by “[pressing] her forehead to the glass” (16). While the mother sincerely and dearly desires the companionship at home, the father “finds himself listless, irritable” in the face of serenity and “absence of imminent disaster” (7). The whole tone of the description for the father is vibrant, accompanied by a lot of metaphors of him, the sky, or the balloon. By contrast, the approach to describe the mother is calmer, with a lot of psychological activities. The father’s underlying passion flowing and burning from within is for his expedition, not for the mother. However, what the mother expected is his love and a more spiritual adventure and what she does not expect is when “[the] father’s leaving turned from adventure to abandonment” (22). The contrast flows throughout the whole story and is an indication of the fundamental confliction between them because of their dichotomy of subject of