The Significance Of Internal Conflicts In Richard Wagamese's Him Standing

In Richard Wagamese’s book Him Standing, Lucas smoke is challenged to create a spirit mask, something he’s never done before, by someone he’s never met before but knows him. The main conflict that moves the plot forward is the dreams that Lucas is having and the effects they had on him, his carving, and interactions with others. Lucas has internal conflicts with his weird feelings of Knight, the spiritual energy of Him Standing, and managing his stress and emotions of the project. Amy, Lucas’s girlfriend, helps to relieve some of his stress, let out his frustrations and acts as a support system for Lucas (Wagamese 25-36). The setting and time of these events creates specific insights for Lucas. In earlier chapters, the mood is happier and easy going as Lucas is enjoying his life and carving on the boardwalk. After meeting Knight, the mood shifts to being dark, stressed, fearful, Lucas starts to be stubborn, and his mental state starts to weaken. The setting of these chapters mostly take place in Lucas’s apartment or in his dreams. This is significant because home is normally a safe, secure, and place of comfort, but those feelings are taken away and

Sensory images impact the understanding of events by describing how come things make them feel physically, feelings that the reader can relate to. One example is at the end of Lucas’s dream, he feels “icy hands” push him so deep into a pool where he could no longer see anything from the surface and had no air, making his lungs want to “explode” (Wagamese 29). If the readers were ever to hold their breath for a long time, they too could experience a feeling like what Lucas describes. Reoccurring images enrich the work and hint at its meaning by giving the reader more details about it every time to build the mental image of the carving and explaining the dreams that gave the images meaning (Wagamese