ipl-logo

Death By Landscape Analysis

1072 Words5 Pages

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,

Show More
Related
781 Words | 4 Pages

In the 2013 online article, “The Chris McCandless Obsession Problem”, author Diana Saverin describes the Alaskan wilderness travel phenomenon along with attempting to uncover the ‘McCandless Pilgrims’ “root of motivation. Sparked by the release of both Jon Krakauer’s and Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild”, numerous individuals pack their backpacks and eagerly step into their (sometimes newly-bought) hiking shoes and tramp into the Alaskan Wild to pay homage to their hero Chris McCandless. Filled with personal anecdotes and interviews, Severin’s Outside article takes a new approach Into the Wild commentary by directing attention to the lives McCandless’s story affected indirectly rather than critiquing on McCandless himself. In response to what appears to be a huge amount of troubled McCandless-inspired tramping stories, Saverin provides an unbiased rationale as a attempt to explain why so many are “willing to risk injury, and even death, to..visit the last home of Alaska’s most famous adventure casualty”. Saverin begins her article with anecdote- telling the unfortunate experience of young lovers and adept adventure seekers, Ackerman and Gros.

Read More
342 Words | 2 Pages

In this passage from Last child in the Woods, an extremely discouraged Richard Louv shows the separation of nature to both parents and children. By showing imagery through car rides in the present vs. car rides in the past he shows an extraordinary change. By his use of rhetorical devices such as pathos, ethos, and imagery Louv produces a captivating argument to fire up the modern generation. Throughout the passage Louv cites many sources, and deserves credit.

Read More
528 Words | 3 Pages

By engaging with these pristine landscapes, we connect with the legacy of those who came before us and forge a lasting bond with nature itself. Pathos Rhetoric:

Read More
90 Words | 1 Pages

In his 1995 essay “The Trouble with Wilderness,” William Cronon declares that “the time has come to rethink wilderness” (69). From the practice of agriculture to masculine frontier fantasies, Cronon argues that Americans have historically defined wilderness as an “island,” separate from their polluted urban industrial homes (69). He traces the idea of wilderness throughout American history, asserting that the idea of untouched, pristine wilderness is a harmful fantasy. By idealizing wilderness from a distance, he argues that people justify the destruction of less sublime landscapes and aggravate environmental conflict.

Read More
87 Words | 1 Pages

The following poems all teach readers the importance and significance of wildlife and the horrible treatment they too often receive from human beings. As everything becomes more modern, we can not help but stray farther away from nature. This increasingly insensitive attitude can have detrimental effects on the environment. Although the elements of poetry used in the following poems vary, Gail White’s “Dead Armadillos,” Walt McDonald’s “Coming Across It,” and Alden Nowlan’s “The Bull Moose,” all share one major conflict; our civilization 's problematic relationship to the wild.

Read More
1908 Words | 8 Pages

The frontier ideology is defined as an allure of nature that is culturally spread and shaped by people’s ideals of how the wilderness should truly be. The problematic effects resulted by McCandless’ journey into the undomesticated land of Alaska are analogous to the quandaries that the frontier ideology creates for our environmental. Just as the ideology is embedded in his mind; it is also embedded in the minds of many others. However, McCandless story can actually teach us about the plights with our culture and in doing so, allows us to move forward. This has turned into a myth in which many believe that the most important parts of nature are areas that have been untouched by human hands.

Read More
462 Words | 2 Pages

Filmmakers use specific shot composition to present the portrait as a character who can interact with others. Hitchcock, in Vertigo, uses the traditional Hollywood shot–reverse–shot: We see a character, then what the character sees, and then its reactions. In the museum scene, the magical and obsessing power of the portrait is conveyed by the camera movement. The camera switches between the female character and the painting. Indeed it first switches between the bouquet on the museum bench and the identical flower piece in the painting, and then it switches between Madeleine’s curl of hair and the identical curl of hair on the painted portrait.

Read More
812 Words | 4 Pages

Louv uses pathos to illustrate his disdain with man’s separation from nature. He mainly uses pathos through his personal anecdotes with nature. For instance, Louv recounts on how witnessing nature through a drive “was the landscape we watched as children. It was our drive by movie” (55-56). By stating

Read More
524 Words | 3 Pages

“An Entrance to the Woods” is an essay by Wendell Berry about the serenity and importance of nature in his life. In this essay, the author uses tone shifts from dark to light to convey his idea of finding rebirth and rejuvenation through nature. In the beginning of the essay, Berry has left civilization for the first time in a while, and finds himself missing human company and feeling “inexplicably sad” (671). This feeling of sadness is in part from the woods itself, and partly due to Berry leaving the hustle and bustle of normal life in the cities, and the violent change from constant noise to silence causes him to feel lonely in the woods. As a result of feeling alone in the woods, the tone of the essay is dark and brooding, as seen through Berry’s somber diction and mood, as seen on page 671: “And then a heavy feeling of melancholy and lonesomeness comes over me.

Read More
916 Words | 4 Pages

It is in the woods that they encounter what can only be described as a living horror dragging itself through the greenery, leaving a path of destruction and decay in its wake “When it had gone, Penny and Primrose, kneeling on the moss and dead leaves….then they stood up still silent, and stared together, hand in hand, at the trail of obliteration and destruction, which wound out of the

Read More
732 Words | 3 Pages

It also exemplifies the jurastic difference between the peaceful areas of the forest and the extreme woods in Alaska. One moment there can be a nice little open field and the next you cannot see ten feet without a tree getting in your way. From that the reader can easily foreshadow the events to come in Alex’s

Read More
422 Words | 2 Pages

And the Summer was Over Summer is a universal symbol with as positive connotation filled with happiness and warm, long nights. When the temperature drops and jackets get pulled from the back of your closet, winter is approaching. Winter can be a time of snow mans and hot chocolate or a period of sadness, mystery, guilt, and regret. Alice Walker’s last sentence of her beautiful story, “The Flowers,” states, “And the summer was over,” which is a symbolic explanation that after every happy moment of euphoria comes a time of sadness and sorrow.

Read More
551 Words | 3 Pages

Nature is easily projected onto, as it allows for a sense of peacefulness and escapism. Due to its ability to evoke an emotional reaction from the masses, many writers have glorified it through various methods, including describing its endless beauty and utilizing it as a symbol for spirituality. Along with authors, artists also show great respect and admiration for nature through paintings of grandiose landscapes. These tributes disseminate a fixed interpretation of the natural world, one full of meaning and other worldly connections. In “Against Nature,” Joyce Carol Oates strips away this guise given to the environment and replaces it with a harsher reality.

Read More
779 Words | 4 Pages

The short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a brilliant piece of fictional literature. The tale involves a mentally ill woman who is kept in a hideous, yellow room under the orders of her husband, John, who is a physician. The ill woman is conflicted due to the fact that the horrifying yellow wallpaper in the room is trapping a woman who she must help escape, but the sick woman is aware that she must get better in order to leave the terrifying, yellow room. The setting and personification applied in the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, allows readers to develop an understanding of the sickness of the main character faces.

Read More
524 Words | 3 Pages

Alice Walker uses imagery and diction throughout her short story to tell the reader the meaning of “The Flowers”. The meaning of innocence lost and people growing up being changed by the harshness of reality. The author is able to use the imagery to show the difference between innocence and the loss of it. The setting is also used to show this as well.

Read More

More about Death By Landscape Analysis

Open Document