Guterson’s
technique.
The whole
novel is framed within the three day trial of Kabuo Miyamoto. As you reread for
revision, notice the ways in which Guterson uses memories and historical/descriptive
details to expand this timescale and to allow fluid movement between past and
present.
Note
and learn some sample chapters and
sequences within and between chapters.
You
should then sample the novel to track how and when we learn details about the
characters of the major players.
Remember
the various genres which the book hybridises; these include:
-
whodunit
(thriller)
-
novel
to evoke time and place (Puget Sound in the 1940s and 50s)
-
a
novel of coming of age/growing up/rites of passage
-
a
war novel covering its effects on individuals and communities
-
a
war novel vividly recreating the realities of war for those involved
-
a
moral novel about man’s quest for the meaning of life/ what is right and wrong
-
textbook
accounts of farming and fishing
-
a
romance
Here
is an analysis of chapters 2 to 4.
-
first
witness is called: Art Moran
-
Hooks
questions
-
Art
Moran reveals he decided to investigate himself – not call the coastguard – as
‘I felt it was the right thing to do’; this answer ‘gave him the authority of
the conscientious man, for which there was ultimately no substitute’ (Note
the introduction of a major theme here.)
-
narrator
goes into a description of Art for one para and then we are into a 3rd
person account of what he had remembered
in bed the night previous to the trial (‘He and his deputy, Abel
Martinson, had taken the county launch to White Sand Bay…’)
-
Readers
relive with him finding the boat, noticing the coffee cup and the marine
battery.
-
We
share his memory within this memory of
Carl (‘He liked Carl Heine, knew Carl’s family, went to church with them…’). He
remembers Carl’s mother selling her 30 acres to the Jurgensons while Carl was
away in the war.
-
We
then have a potted biography of Carl, probably in Art’s memory, as a man
‘courteous but not friendly…a good man…rarely laughed’.
-
Dialogue
with Abel leads to testing the batteries, getting the net in and finding the
body.
-
Art
notices a head wound: ‘ Must have banged it against the gunnel going over.’
We never
hear the main development of the q and a session directly; chapter 3 begins
with Nels’s cross examination . Chapter 3 reads like a script and the cut and
thrust of the questioning adds drama as Nels establIshes
-
it
was an accident, as nothing disturbed
-
the
2 men were friends
-
the
head wound could possibly have been caused after death
Note how the change of technique maintains our
interest and has an element of dramatic immediacy.
Chapter 4
begins with the 10.45 recess being called. A brief description of the jurors
being led away and the effects of the storm leads to a focus on Ishmael moving
to the gallery (feels more at home with the community rather than the outside
reporters). We then have (para 8) a 3rd person account of Ishmael’s
hearing news of the death of Carl interspersed with his memories of him.
Before we
hear of his arrival at the harbour to ask his reporter’s questions, however, we
have nearly 2 sides on his character and how; he is troubled by his amputated
arm – the visible sign of his war experience (and, for readers later, the
symbol of his emotional wound). We then have 2 sides on his father and the San
Piedro Review, establishing that he had been ‘morally meticulous’, something
Ishmael finds hard to emulate because ‘there was … this matter of the war’.
A further
side and a half on Ishmael reveals he has seen people as ‘animated cavities
full of strings and liquids’. He ‘wanted to like everyone. He just couldn’t
find a way to do it.’ We learn he sees
himself as ‘a one armed man with a pinned up sleeve, past 30 and unmarried’.
His mother, commenting on his cynicism, tells him, ‘ You’re your father’s son.’
Note: we have here the
ingredients for the personal journey Ishmael must make: he must learn that the
way to like people is to lose the chip on his shoulder over the losses of his
arm and Hatsue and to see people as individuals with lives and families, not as
animated cavities. When he has done this, his task will be to find himself in
the same way: the final words of both his mother and Hatsue to him are the
advice to get married and have children. Both Carl and Kabuo have fouhnd
degrees of peace and fulfilment through doing this.
Guterson
in chapters 2 and 3 has provided clues
for the ‘whodunit’ plot and in chapter 4 has provided clues for the growing
up/self-realisation/redemption theme.
We
finally have a 3rd person account of Ishmael at Amity Harbor. Yet
before we learn of his enquiries, we are given a text book style description of the lifestyle of a gill
netter, and novel-of-time-and-place descriptions of how ‘in San Piedro the
silent, autonomous gill-netter became
the collective image of the good man.’
Note: good implies also its
opposite, evil, and part of the storm of prejudice against Kabuo derives from
the subcouscious identification fo him, as resembling the wartime enemy, with
the evil which attempts to obliterate the good.
We
finally have the conversations involving Art, Ishmael and the fIshermen. We
learn that Dale Middleton followed Carl’s boat out (Note: this means that
Hooks’s later hypothesis that Kabuo followed him out is improbable – but no-one
seems to remember this.) Carl was
in Ship Channel Bank, set in for the night and the fog was ‘ fog soup’: the
alert ‘whodunit ‘ reader has a clue here; all readers can relate the fog
symbolically to their and the court’s quest for the truth.
Ishmael
reveals he knows the Miyamotos by name, as Dale Middleton says, ‘Suckers all
look alike.’
The chapter ends with Ishmael being asked by Art Moran to – for
the moment – report this as an accident.
Note: the implication here that
the movement will be away from this ‘accident’ theory is in fact a traditional
‘whodunit’ red herring.