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Death By Landscape Analysis

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The Wilderness of Death Summer camp is supposed to be a sunny, adventurous and fun time in a child's life, but not in Margaret Atwood's, Death By Landscape. Atwood tells a story of a women, Lois, that experiences the tragic loss of her best friend, Lucy, as a young girl. The story goes on to tell the effects the tragic disappearance had on Lois. In order to illustrate Lois’ symbolic death, Atwood uses the motif of landscapes as well as comparisons and imagery. By using two settings throughout Death By Landscape, Atwood shows the change from Lois’s once content life to almost a static death like existence. Atwood uses the woods of Canada and Lois’s lonely condominium to create the visual change within Lois. With the help of imagery, Atwood …show more content…

At the end of the story the narrator describes the paintings by saying, “Instead there’s a tangle, a receding maze, in which you can become lost almost as soon as you step off the path”(Atwood 118). The purpose of the portraits in Lois’ house are to symbolize that not only are the landscapes mazes, but Lois also feels that her mind is a maze in which she is lost in. She has spent most of her life after Lucy’s death collecting these mazes and trying to comprehend the loss, but has failed to move on with her own life. Lois is left living a very dull, half hearted life that could be interpreted as “death”. The portraits are also seen as an important symbol in other articles such as, “Envoicing Silent Objects”, which states, “As the story progresses, we learn that Lois keeps these paintings not because they give her pleasure but because they remind her of a traumatic incident from her childhood”(Brock 58). This provides evidence that many critics and readers also agree that the portraits are not just pictures, but symbols that affect the story greatly. It is evident that the portraits are used to show how Lucy’s disappearance traumatized Lois to the point that she can not move on with her …show more content…

“Death By Landscape.” Wilderness Tips, Doubleday, 1991, pp. 97-118 Brock, Richard. "Envoicing Silent Objects: Art and Literature at the Site of the Canadian Landscape." Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, vol. 13, no. 2, 01 Jan. 2008, pp. 50-61. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&AN=EJ842753&site=ehost-live. Witchey, Eric M. "Build Characters with Simile, Metaphor and Symbol: A Veteran Story Writer Offers a Process for Mining Your Fiction for Rich Figurative Material." Writer (Kalmbach Publishing Co.), vol. 123, no. 10, Oct. 2010, p. 30. EBSCOhost,

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