Sonntag, 2. Dezember 2007

Response on The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

Honestly, I am not sure yet whether I like this excerpt or whether not. This is may be because there is so less action in this piece of literature that helps me forming an opinion. This excerpt tells about a character who mentions his favourite place which is under the eucalyptus trees and his relationship to nature and how he perceives especially the eucalyptus trees and some animals.

The first odd thing about the character is how he discovers human traits in the eucalyptus trees:

“I began to notice that the uppermost twigs and leaves were lyrical happy dancers glad that they had been apportioned the top, with all that rumbling experience of the whole tree swaying beneath them making their dance … I noticed how the leaves almost looked human the way they bowed and then leaped up and then swayed lyrically side to side. It was a crazy vision in my mind but beautiful.”

Then he continues describing a “hummingbird, a beautiful little blue hummingbird no bigger than a dragonfly, kept making a whistling jet dive at me, definitely saying hello to me, every day, usually in the morning”.

This seems to create a very harmonic- even too harmonic- picture of the scene. But then he continues to say that he was “afraid he would drive right into my head with his long beaker like a hatpin”.

All in all it is interesting how the speaker creates a certain distance by on the one hand describing the romantic landscape picture and on the other hand perceiving a little hummingbird as a threat.

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