Rock Springs - Technical Features

7/31/2019 Rock Springs - Technical Features

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20/02/2012

Rock Springs: FormalFeatures- Motif: Light and Hope- Symbolism- Character - Narrative Point of View- Imagery - simile/metaphor


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Motif: Light and Hope

- Light crops up over and again in the story. There areimages of sunsets, Rock Springs glowing in the distance,the trailer park home lights, and the gold mine.

- The always act as symbols of hope - purpose, success,escape, etc.

- Yet they are always undermined or tainted.- Ultimately they represent the failure of hope, or moregently, they represent hope as illusory


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Symbol: The car

- The car can be read as a representation of Earls view of himself.

- It is also always a representation of the reality of Earlssituation - criminal.

- At a wider level, the car comes to represent a crisis of

identity for the main character. The tension between thesetwo symbolic levels helps us to understand the tension thatexists within Earl.


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Symbol: The Oil Light

- Its a red light, a warning light, and seemingly insignificant,yet it has control over Earl.

- At the philosophical level, it is an aspect of the textsrepresentation of uncertainty; the lack of control thatplagues modern existence.

- Ford has shaped Earls narrative around the red light - atthe widest level, it is symbolic of the breaking down of Earlslife.


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Symbol: The Goldmine

- the goldmine is a representation of a purpose narrative. It sitsalongside the sunset and rainbow imagery that exists earlier.

- It is an illusion for Earl.

- This illusion is painfully pointed out by Edna, but is eventuallyrealised by Earl in his a place I saw a goldmine.

- I would argue that this shift in attitude towards the goldmine isa representation of Earls shifting attitude towards purpose.


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Character: Earl

- I would argue that Earl comes to represent the alienationand isolation of the modern condition.

- Alone, living an utterly uncertain existence, slowly realisingthe unknowability of others, the struggle of knowing himself,the fundamental illusion of purpose, and seeing an oddsense of chaos in the world.


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Narrative Point of View

- The speaker is older, wiser, but we get hints from the story that heisnt necessarily happier.

- My thinking is that Ford is deeply interested in the power of thestory in a world where meaning is so difficult to attain.

- Ford has said: "It is not that we are connoisseurs of chaos, butthat we are surrounded by it, and equipped for co-existence with it

only by our fictive powers."- The stories are way out of the meaninglessness that surroundsthe narrator; a means of self-understanding, and therefore a way of getting by in an impossible world.


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Imagery: Simile/Metaphor

- Rare in Dirty Realism - most writing in the genre avoidsimagery. Dirty Realism, works literally, rather than figuratively.

- This makes the images all the more powerful - it means theystand out and demand to be read.

- The images tend to come at moments where the narrator stilldoesnt understand the situation hes creating an image for.

- And so Id argue that the imagery can read as momentswhere language fails the narrator and he is forced to resort toimagery to capture something uncapturable.


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The Key Arguments

The following are three arguments I think you can make bydrawing widely from the text.

These are not the only arguments you can make with thetext. If you have a belief/interpretation, you are more thanwelcome to write it, as long as you can support it.

You want to be in a situation where you feel you can speakabout how the text acts as a representation of ideas muchbigger than itself.


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1: Purpose/meaning as illusory

- Narratives of success are constantly undermined. Any imageor idea that is meant to provide structure, purpose, or meaningto existence in utterly illusory. It simply does not exist.

- The image of the rainbow: the importance of seems

- The image of the goldmine: a place I once saw a goldmine

- Most of the light imagery

- The demand for Story to give structure and meaning toexistence


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2: The nature of the modern

human condition- Fundamental uncertainty - at the core of existence is a state of complete uncertainty

- Kants says our world is unknowable, Nietzsche says individualidentity is unknowable (and if we are unknowable how can we ever know any one else?), and the linguists say we cant communicatebecause language is fundamentally empty.

- Represented in the story by the bleak images of the landscape,Ednas monkey story and Earls inability to understand itsimportance to her, the destruction of that relationship, the oil light,the Negro womans grandson and anywhere else in the story wherecharacters are at the mercy of the universe.


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3: The problem of identity in a

post-Existentialist world- Existentialism suggests that our choices determine our identities

- We are fully in control of our choices - always, even if the choice is

horribly limited

- Therefore we must be fully accountable for the identities that weinhabit.

- Earl suffers an existential crisis - the fiction of himself is whatkeeps him optimistic, what keeps him motivated. If he were to dropthe fiction and face his actions, he would suffer the pain of seeingthe identity he has created.


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NCEA Questions...

1. Theme, over and above narrative and characterisation this captures the essence of all short stories. To whatextent do you agree with this view?

2. Techniques used by short story writers allow them to saymore with less . To what extent do you agree with this view?

3. Short stories are most often about characters whoselives are solitary, poor, nasty, or brief . To what extent doyou agree with this view?

4. The characteristics of short stories allow readers toexplore events from their own life and times. To whatextent do you agree with this view?

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