Notes for Mortality (Life and Death) For our paper, click this link: Death Paper

Outline:Hey i think this would be a good outline of the paper: To say there is a difference between life and death and how(Show examples from the book and real life. What do people simbolize life with and death with) Then go through how each charcter lives their life and then how they die. Is how they die a way of how they lived their life? How they feel about death? a.k.a. Wes dies of cancer because of things eating away at him.

" Life was simply too hard, an so much of your attention and energy went into keeping not only yourself but also your family, your crops, and your cattle alive, that nothing was left over for raising hell or making trouble." (pg 16)

This quote is talking about how hard it was to survive. There was a lot of things you had to take care of. To survive in life it took a lot of energy and to cause problems would just make you more tired.

"Out of town I could simply be, I could feel my self, firm and calm and unmalleable as I could not when I was in school or in any of the usual human communities that seemed to weaken or scatter me."(pg 24)

This is David talking about being out in the country. He does not like being stuck in the town.. He does not feel alive there. When he is out in the country he feels alive. He can do whatever he wants and run wild. He does not have to live by the rules of society and confrom to what other people say.

"Those were the last words Marie spoke to me. The next day Monday, August 13, 1948, Marie Little Soldier was dead."(pg 86)

Marie died on this day and David never even got a time to say goodbye. This is an example of death in the story.

"Certainly there would be sadness---Aunt Gloria was a widow, my father was suddenly, like me, an only child, Grandma's tears would fill a rain barrel----but this grief would pass. Once the mourning period passed, we would have our lives back...."

I think this would be how a normal family would feel about a death of a loved one. Once you get over the mourning and let them go your life will return to normal once again though the way he died isn't as common. (page 161)

"as I climed the stairs, I felt something for my uncle in death that I hadn' t felt for him in life. It was gratitude, yes, but it was something more. It was very close to love."

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David felt gratitude for his uncle because he believed things would be better and no ones feelings/reputations would be hurt. I bet he felt like if everthing was laid out on the table people would look on his family different. Hey what page was this quote on? Did you like the outline? These are good quotes. It's on the last page 175

"I felt strangely calm, as if I had been in a state of high agitation but had now calm down, my pulse returned to normal, my breathing slowed, y vision cleared. I needed that, I thought; I hadn't even known it but I needed to kill something. The events, the discoveries, the secrets of the past few days--Marie's illness, Uncle Fanks's sins, the tension between my father and mother--had excited something in me that wasn't released until I shot a magpie out of a pine tree."(pg 81-82)

David said this right after he killed the bird while he was at his grandparents ranch. I think that it shows his views on death, and more specifically, murder. It shows that he thinks it is okay to kill an innocent thing just to make himself feel better. It shows that death is not a big deal to him if he doesn't have any type of emotional connection to what dies.

"My view of Uncle Frank was unobstructed, and I steadied the sights on his head, right in front og his ear. The gun was unloaded, of course, but I wondered at that moment what might happen if it weren't. And my first question wasn't, could I pull the triger; it was, from that distance, with that weapon, under those conditions--the wind, the slope of the hill--hit my target.... --did I wonder what might happen if I killed my uncle. would everyone's problems be solved? Would my father be relieved? Could I get away with it?" (pg 84)

This quote goes with the last one, about how David feels about death and murder. It shows that he doesn't really have a huge problem with killing something if he doesn't have any strong emotinal ties to it. He doesn't really like his uncle that much, and here, he was having thoughts about killing him, David seems to think that death isn't a big deal. He doesn't understand that it is wrong to kill someone, whether they deserve it or not, I think that he is kind of unstable mentally speaking.

On Page 108 and 109, Wes had just locked up Frank in the basement, and I don't want to write the quote because it is really long and takes up a quarter of a page so I will just summarize it. David was having thoughts that since Frank didn't come up the stairs that he thought his father killed him. He, in a way, hoped that his father killed him, he thought of the different ways his father had done it, and he was making excuses to himself for reasons that his dad killed his uncle.

Once David learned of all Frank's sins, he didn't idolize him anymore, in fact he basically hated him. He feels that everything would just be better if his uncle would be killed or die, he thinks that his father would be happier and that his whole life would be better if he would just die. Thats why he keeps having thoughts about someone killing his uncle. It also explains why, after he has those thoughts, he makes excuses to himself justifying why he felt that. He thinks that since he felt better after killing the bird, that he would feel better and everyone else would too if his uncle would somehow die.

David's father said to the grandfather that nobody has the right to stop this case from happening, or to stop anything that has to deal with any of it at all. Then David thinks "Not for any of us? I thought again of how I help my uncle in the sights of my pistol, of how I held, even tighter, the secret information that Uncle Frank had been in our house the afternoon Marie Died." (pg 122)

I don't know if this really means anything, but I think that David feels that he is responsible for all of this trouble happening. He feels that maybe if her had just shot and killed his uncle that day at the ranch that Marie would still be alive and they wouldn't be going through all of this. He is trying to justify his thouhts about killing his uncle.

__"The canning jars, he's smashing them." My mother needlessly added. "He's gotton into the root cellar," said my father. "he must be breaking every jar in there."

"All my jars of tomatoes and rutabagas. The pickles. The plum jelly. The applesauce. That corn relish you like so much."__ (page 153)

In a Way this passage has a hidden meaning. Think of the jars as a symbol of a woman (the fruit as the womb) Now Frank is Breaking The jars. Why would he do that? Do the jars symbolize the women he has raped? Or killed? I Think he is feeling like he needs to get rid of the horrible past he has contributed to by smashing the jars so he can move on. He was very upset in those finale moments and I think he realizes that he can't take back the past.

"In my father's case, it was not only the secret he held in but also his bitterness.  Which eventually turned into his cancer."

This is referring to the truth not being revealed.  The truth will eat away at you if you don't say the truth.  Wes kept the secret about Frank and David say it eventually killed him through cancer eating away at him.

"Yet what I heard signalled such a breath in our lives, a chasm permanently dividing what we were from what we could never be agin, that it seems some commensurate unit of time should be involved."

This is when is uncle Frank dies and David realizes his life will never be the same again.  His family will have to find a way to recover from this event without anyone knowing.  They will have to hide the truth about Frank for the rest of their lives.  David knew his life would change forever and not know what to expect for the future.