Gary Paulsen Winterdance Metaphors

Drew Da

Dogs, Moose, and Beaver. Oh My!

Do dogs smile? Author Gary Paulsen, in his memoir Winterdance, uses symbol, theme, and metaphors to further the reader’s understanding of the dog-human relationship. Paulsen lives in Minnesota, he decides to starts running dogs on a trapline. He eventually moves to Alaska and wants to run the Iditarod. He tells his stories and explains his relationships with the dogs. He explains the struggles using the literary concepts of symbols, theme, and metaphors to expand the reader’s understanding or the text.

Symbol is an object representing something else. It is a concept or idea that uses something else to show it. At the beginning of the book, Paulsen encounters a beaver while racing on a frozen lake. The dogs see the beaver and start go haywire hen this happens. A symbol in Winterdance is the beaver. The beaver represents the unknown and represents what the reader does not know. Paulsen thought the beaver would attack, but it didn’t. “They would not be able to stop themselves, would tear into him… But

The message appeals to everyone, it can affect everyone. When Paulsen was running the Dalzell Gorge and the Burn he was thinking about scratching out from the race. He was in soo much pain and was just so tired from it all. “And home to a warm bed and a bath and a hot meal and and and… I looked at Cookie instead.” (p. 187). The theme that goes along with this memory is never giving up. He never left or quit the race, he pushed through and finished the race. This appeals to everyone’s life by just giving the basic fact of never giving up. This quote expands the ideas of possibilities of never giving up and succeeding. The reader can understand about how the themes relate to the real world and how never giving up can help everyone achieve success. That is, how theme can the reader expand the knowledge of Winterdance, Paulsen also uses metaphors to expand the