RA brainstorming

Thesis Statement:
The incentive behind the writing: (Carol) end of the paper) render anxiety of separation
[nihilism, dreaming] (detachment from community <-> government/church (Dark Night
Dreaming) Horror based on the predication that dislocation of cultural criteria cuts along
categorical interstiality and contradictoriness. -> Our conceptual frameworks are precariously
unstable (father’s doubts and conflicts of “good guy” and “bad guy”.

Solution: not nihilism -> going on and “compassion?” (if living for living, we fall under the
grasp of nihilism)

Purity (“Noel” takes stands from the positive character)

Message:
Two motivations behind their survival:
1. Abstract: going south. The father is very aware that “the south” is not going to be very
different from their current space, but he tries to convince himself and his son that things
would be better in the south. (Connection to real life: we are sometimes just relying on a
faith that things will be better later in our life, but no confirmation is ever given. Horror
of the unknown)
2. Concrete: Carrying of the fire. The fire could mean the hope of humanity, i.e., love
compassion, community, selflessness and trust in each other. (Connection to real life: We
try to do good when possible. Because our objectives might change, life trajectory and
expectations might change, environment might change, but our moral code can stay the
same)

 Message: If all we are doing is looking for tools (money, sex, pleasure) to survive, we are
only surviving for the sake of survival. “Going south” would carry no exact meaning if
we are only going south. Instead, we are doing good and trying to reach a point where
people would all do good to each other. -> Looking for the greater thing…

 Contradictions: Father’s disbelief in most people <-> Child’s innocence

 Contradictions: Father’s self-reinforcement of the idea of doing good and love <-> his
own actions of separation and breaking away

 Conventions: Art-Horror: Categorically contradictory beliefs, incomplete value system

(For example, mother’s loss of hope and desperation. She cannot figure out the meaning
of living on and she just gave up figuring it out.)

 Conventions: Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Mother’s “lack of resilience”. Female

character’s suicide. -> women as a symbol of love? -> Father’s dependence on his wife
  Conventions: Intro to Dark Night Dreaming: Cannibalism == Atavism? A reverse to an
earlier age. Nihilism <-> Mother’s thoughts <-> Novel’s mentions of “void” (seen in
descriptive languages when the author is describing the surroundings.)

Recurring elements:
1. Cart (Stores the memory of the child -> father ditched his wife’s photo)
 Symbolizes the history of the father and the boy. The cart has accompanied them to the
end of the father’s journey. It was constantly hidden and its belongings were stolen
before, and even the cart itself. -> A metaphor for losing things in our life. But the
connection stays. The father and his boy stay.
 Context: “Our stuffs”

2. Dreams

Texts:

Father: In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where
the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls.
Like pilgrims in

Father: In dreams his pale bride came to him out of a green and leafy canopy. Her
nipples pipeclayed and her rib bones painted white. She wore a dress of gauze and
her dark hair was carried up in combs of ivory, combs of shell. Her smile, her
downturned eyes. In the morning it was snowing again. Beads of small gray ice
strung along the light-wires overhead.

Father: He mistrusted all of that. He said the right dreams for a man in peril were
dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and of death. He slept little and
he slept poorly. He dreamt of walking in a flowering wood where birds flew before
them he and the child and the sky was aching blue but he was learning how to
wake himself from just such siren worlds. Lying there in the dark with the uncanny
taste of a peach from some phantom orchard fading in his mouth. He thought if he
lived long enough the world at last would all be lost. Like the dying world the
newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory.

Mother: Then don’t. I can’t help you. They say that women dream of danger to
those in their care and men of danger to themselves. But I don’t dream at all. You
say you can’t? Then don’t do it.

Father: Standing at the edge of a winter field among rough men. The boy's age. A
little older. Watching while they opened up the rocky hillside ground with pick and
mattock and brought to light a great bolus of serpents perhaps a hundred in
number. Collected there for a common warmth. The dull tubes of them beginning
to move sluggishly in the cold hard light. Like the bowels of some great beast
exposed to the day. The men poured gasoline on them and burned them alive,
having no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as they conceived it to be.
The burning snakes twisted horribly and some crawled burning across the floor of
the grotto to illuminate its darker recesses. As they were mute there were no
screams of pain and the men watched them burn and writhe and blacken in just
such silence themselves and they disbanded in silence in the winter dusk each with
his own thoughts to go home to their suppers.