Clover Autrey

Has there ever been a person, when they first came to any ocean, who did not take a moment to just stand and see? Whether on a calm day as the wide expanse curves on the horizon with waves rolling in long hypnotic sweeps, or whether it’s a day of storms and mighty crests crashing against rocks, one can’t but stop and gape at the power of something beyond ourselves. When Henry David Thoreau set out to go to Cape Cod to look at the sea and ponder and write about its majesty, he found that the day before he arrived, a ship full of emigrants from Ireland had been beaten violently on the harsh rocky shores and more than a hundred people had lost their lives. Irish mourners flocked to the scene, traveling the same path with Thoreau, yet it was the local villagers and how they went about the business of recovering the corpses that seemed to fascinate Thoreau. In “The Shipwreck”, Thoreau explains how people who live near the waters of Cape Cod have become pragmatic in the aftermath of the sea’s brutality, and how Thoreau’s view of the sea has this same detachment of the harshness in common with “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

As Thoreau walked down to the beach, he saw the local farmers and tradesmen bringing wagons down, loaded with rough-hewn boxes to be used as coffins. There had only been twenty-eight bodies founds of the one hundred and forty-five perished. The locals were busily engaged in finding the rest beneath the largest part of the wreckage which lay onshore. Yet Thoreau “witnessed no signs of grief, but there was a sober dispatch of business which was affecting” (1) as the men went about nailing down lids or trying to identify certain bodies sought by the Irish who had come to find them. Others were collecting sea-weed for fertilizer, taking it higher up on shore so it would not be lost in the tide “though they were often obliged to separate fragments of clothing from it, and they might at any moment have found a human body under it (Thoreau 1). Even though there was a tragic event just beyond their homes, the people living by the sea understood the importance of gathering what one could from the ocean. The locals had acquired a great deal of resilience to cope with the horrors that living by the ocean and near one of the deadliest shores demanded of them. They became people who were able to detach themselves from what the harsh sea spat out in order to do what had to be done for those who couldn’t do it for themselves. Yet, Thoreau conjectures, for all their pragmatism and seemingly being unaffected, once the funeral procession had passed on and the mass graves covered, it was the local villagers who “would watch there many days and nights for the sea to give up its dead, and their imaginations and sympathies would supply the place of mourners far away, who as yet knew not of the wreck” (1). Thoreau muses that the inhabitants should have a crest on their family shields of a wave and the datura plant, “which is said to produce mental alienation of long duration” (1) which is the only way they could deal with what the sea brings them. With the dreadfulness of the multitude of corpses around him on the beaches, Thoreau seems to cope by wondering about man’s relationship to the sea, as well as how that may fit into the afterlife, much like the wonderings of the Mariner about the sea in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.

Thoreau, too, appears to take on the detachment shown by the locals at seeing so many dead at one time. He notes that when “corpses might be multiplied, as on the field of battle, till they no longer affected us in any degree, as exceptions to the common lot of humanity” (Thoreau 1). He goes on to think about how while these poor bodies are ravaged in the ocean, that perhaps they really have sailed into a safe port in Heaven (Thoreau 1) and it doesn’t matter that their corpses are “dashed on the rocks by the enraged Atlantic Ocean” (Thoreau 1). Thoreau ends “The Shipwreck” by writing of another trip to the same beach much later on a calm day. The breezes from the water brought an enjoyable coolness and the water was crystal clear. He looked down and “could see the sea-perch swimming about” (Thoreau 1). The harshness of the sea had been replaced by a calm and beautiful ocean. This same scenario occurred in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. The sea turned on the sailors just as it had turned on the emigrants coming from Ireland. Instead of tossing them and cracking the ship against the rocks, Coleridge’s mariners were caught in a lull in the middle of the ocean, just as dangerous when food and water run out and there is no breeze to sail by. Just as Thoreau did, Coleridge, through his mariner, ponders the afterlife and whether the dead sailors’ souls flew “to bliss or woe!” (Coleridge 1), and whether the pilot who comes to greet him will give him a blessing to wash away his sin of shooting the albatross. Another similarity in the two works is found with how as terrible as the sea can be, both Thoreau and Coleridge saw the beauty the sea can also give in the same way as the mariner looks down into the calm water and glimpses the water-snakes “move in tracks of shining white” (Coleridge 1). The sea can be both terrible and beneficial and those sailing upon it or making a living close to the coast have learned to live in harmony with the nature of the ocean in good or horrible times.

Thoreau was able to witness just one moment of tragedy in one particular day in the lives of the people of Cohasset. He glimpsed their resiliency and how they have learned to live and work near the sea, as well as the pragmatism that has evolved in their character. Thoreau writes about this unyielding practicality of the local inhabitants and how they went to work after a terrible shipwreck, and how all of mankind has the ability to cope with the brutality of the sea, by also seeing the ocean’s beauty as found in Thoreau’s “The Shipwreck” and Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. When next one stands on a seashore, take a deep breath and see.

Works Cited

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Bartleby.com www.bartleby.com/41/415.html 

Thoreau, Henry D. “The Shipwreck.” Cape Cod, 2010. The Project Gutenberg www.gutenberg.org/files/34392/34392-h/34392-h.htm

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A common motif in stories has to do with the hero having to take on a role that circumstances tossed him into (wizard, symbol of rebellion, jedi, politician, mob boss, super spy, etc.). And then the hero discovers that it is the role they were meant to be all along. The hero must learn to take on a leader role to stand on his or her own. Young Adult novels, especially, are littered with the absent parent or adult figure, both emotionally checked out or oftentimes deceased and completely out of the picture. Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games and the boy from The Road are two such characters who have single parents who have checked out of their parenting responsibilities and have unconsciously forced their children to take on the role of the adult. Figuring out our path into adulthood, or what we want to be when we grow up, is a question that everyone can relate to. Especially when, like Katniss and the boy, the paths we are placed on aren’t of our own choosing. Many people can relate to taking on responsibilities at too young of an age, which makes this theme so popular. The theme of finding one’s place in the world is expressed in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games through characters who had to shoulder the burden of two very different types of parentification: instrumental and emotional.

Parentification happens within a parent-child relationship when the parent takes on the dependent role and the child has to take on the responsibilities of an adult. There are two types of parentification; instrumental parentification and emotional parentification. According to Lisa M. Hooper, a counselor at The University of Alabama, “Instrumental parentification is the participation in the physical maintenance and sustenance of the family” (1) which differs from emotional parentification, which “is the participation in the socioemotional needs of family members . . . serving as a confidant, companion, or mate-like figure, mediating family conflict, and providing nurturance and support” (Hooper 1). From the Graduate Student Journal of Psychology, Jennifer A. Englehardt states that, “most often, one or both parents are incapacitated, commonly for physical, social, emotional, or economic reasons, and they come to depend upon the child to meet their needs and the needs of the family” (46).  Katniss and the boy certainly fit that criteria. In The Hunger Games, Katniss shows she is a parentified child on a personal level, however all the children in all of the twelve districts are children of parentification as well. After Katniss’s father’s death, she is forced to step into the role of provider and adult for her mother and sister. At the age of eleven, a year before she can enter her name into the drawing for tesserae, she becomes the provider by hunting when her mother emotionally checks out, a “woman who sat by, blank and unreachable, while her children turned to skin and bones” (Collins 8). Calabria Turner from Georgia College and State University puts the parentification of Katniss this way: “While her mother is succumbing to grief, Katniss becomes the provider her family needs, which forces her to bury her emotions of her father’s death and also disregard any childhood innocence pertaining to the perils of adulthood” (38). While Katniss can be identified more with the instrumental parentification as provider/protector, the boy in The Road is an example of emotional parentification.

The man’s entire purpose for not taking his own life and ending it all, is the boy. The man’s constant has become dread. He no longer sustains faith that there are decent humans left. The man believes that “beauty and goodness are things he’d no longer any way to think about” (McCarthy 61). He even tells the boy, “If you died I would want to die too” (McCarthy 11) reinforcing the boy’s emotional role of keeping his father alive. The man is emotionally unable to confide anything to the boy without passing on his fear of other human beings. It is in this sense that the boy has become the parent figure in providing hope for the future with his insistence that there are other “good guys” still in the world. At the beach, the boy wants to write a message in the sand for the good guys to see. The boy asks, “Maybe we could write a letter to the good guys. So if they came along, they’d know we were here” (McCarthy 245), to which the man immediately answers, “What if the bad guys saw it?” (McCarthy 245). The contrast between the man’s disbelief that there really is anyone good left, and the boy’s hope that there is, is significant in who is keeping the emotional strength between them. This swap of emotional roles is explained by Victoria Hoyle, a medieval archives researcher, as: “The boy needs his father to care for him, to socialize and love him, and the father is acutely aware that he needs the boy to give him a purpose, a reason to keep living in an unreasonable, inconceivable world” (1). The boy’s role isn’t so much as the provider, as Katniss Everdeen’s is, but more in providing the emotional stability for his father. He has become the confidant and companion. On a larger scale, the situation both Katniss and boy find themselves in, also forces them to find their roles in the world. For Katniss, the adults in the districts have to rely on their children for food. There is no way for the children not to step into that world.

The Capitol has ensured that the parents in the district are not able to fulfill their adult roles by making the availability of food limited and only children between twelve and eighteen years of age have the means to get more.  “A meager year’s supply of grain and oil for one person” (Collins 13) is given as tesserae if the children put their names in the reaping drawing extra times. Turner explains the toll this takes on the parent-child relationships this way: “Their role, as is any parent’s, is to supply the family with the necessary provisions, and they cannot do this. The Capitol succeeds in making parents feel impotent as each parent watches their children’s chances of dying increase for the sake of obtaining food that will barely sustain the family” (Turner 32).  While Katniss becomes the provider for her mother and sister, and then protector and provider in the arena for Rue and Peeta, the boy in The Road is an example of parentification in more of an emotional role in his relationship with his father. They both move into their roles. Katniss finds her place as the Mockingjay, the symbol of the resistance. The boy also finds his place in the world as a child survivor who, thanks to his emotional parentification with his father, has the emotional maturity to lead the other children into a more hopeful future for mankind. Collins and McCarthy created fascinating characters who had to find their own place in the world. It is relevant that these books were written in a time when the world was reeling from terrorism and war and everyone was trying to find their place in this uncertain new world.

The Hunger Games and The Road were written in the first decade of the 2000s. This was after the events of September 11^th and in a decade when school shootings were rampant, and the economy was in its downward spiral. These events combined had an influence on the authors and what they saw in the youth of the nation. Collins admits to have taken her inspiration from a reality TV show where children were competing for money and McCarthy’s idea came on a trip with his young son. The younger generations were not alive during the attacks on their home nation like the generation before who remembered Pearl Harbor and the London air raids. Before then we heard of isolated bombings by crazed radicals, and distant attacks in foreign countries. On September 11, 2001 terrorism shattered our sense of safety, of isolated incidents. The decade became one of The War on Terror and bullied children posting manifestos and walking into schools to kill their classmates. Nowhere was safe. No one was safe. And it was obvious to the younger generation that the adults who couldn’t manage the economy had also failed to keep them safe. The youth, as a whole, took it upon themselves to make the change in a world-wide type of parentification where they began leading the charge against anti-bullying, gun control, responsible climate control, and political accountability. No generation before has been as accepting of others and as vocal about the harm of shaming and bullying. Individually, it is a new world of social media shaming and/or uplifting each other that is an obstacle some might say, or a stepping stone in the path of discovering their place in the world. With fear and becoming adults too soon, it’s a small wonder that The Hunger Games and The Road spoke to so many and grew in popularity and commercial success. Collins hit on the unspoken fear of never having any place of real safety and blended it with the popularity of a reality TV spectacle when she wrote The Hunger Games (Engelhardt 46). Likewise, McCormack struck on this same theme as he gazed out of a motel window one quiet night in El Paso and wondered what it would be like in a century where no one is safe and a son and father have only each other to rely on (Johns-Putra 520). Whether he meant to endow the boy with characteristics of a parentified child or it came from his subconscious where he knew the man had no one else to gain emotional support from, it’s difficult to tell. However, the traits of parentification are evident in the boy, which is not necessarily a bad thing. According to Hooper, a study found that “parentification was related to positive outcomes such as high levels of individuation and differentiation from the family system” (1), which is undeniably the case with Katniss and the boy. Each was able to shoulder the “adult” role they were thrust into due to the physical and emotional experience they received through being parentified children.

The theme of discovering one’s role in life has always been a popular theme. Since it is a self-awareness everyone must come to terms with in their own life, it is an idea that everyone can relate to. The Hunger Games and The Road take this theme to new levels as Katniss and the boy must come to the realization of who they are in places of horrific violence and lack, where they were not allowed an innocent childhood and had to take on attributes of adults for themselves and their families. The idea of having to grow up too soon, of lost childhoods, and figuring out who you are, what you stand for, even in a world where your safety can be taken away at any moment accounts for the commercial success of The Hunger Games and The Road.  Whether it was becoming the provider of the family or taking on the role of giving emotional support, Katniss and the boy took on the burden of adulthood and became examples of parentified children who ultimately became the people they were meant to be in Suzanne Collin’s The Hunger Games and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.  

Works Cited

Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. New York: Scholastic, Inc., 2008. Print.

Engelhardt, Jennifer A. “The Developmental Implications of Parentification: Effects on Childhood Attachment.” Columbia University. 2012. https://www.tc.columbia.edu/publications/gsjp/gsjp-volumes-archive/gsjp-volume-14-2012/25227_Engelhardt_Parentification.pdf

Hooper, Lisa M. “Defining and Understanding Parentification: Implications for All Counselors.” The University of Alabama. Jan 2008. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281905738_Defining_and_Understanding_Parentification_Implications_for_All_Counselors

Hoyle, Victoria, et al. “Two Views: The Road by Cormac McCarthy.” Strange Horizons. March 2007. http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/two-views-the-road-by-cormac-mccarthy/

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. Vintage Books. 2006.

Turner, Calabria. “A Parthenos in Pop Culture: Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games.” Journal of the Georgia Philological Association, vol. 7, Jan. 2017, pp. 31–44. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=133435701&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Annie Dillard takes a meandering route, moving forward and backward and around again as she writes about how she attempted to search out gifts from the universe in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She equates this exploration to how as a child she would leave pennies along the sidewalk near her home for anyone to find, sometimes leaving chalk arrows, or clues for them to see the penny. (Dillard 1) In the same vein of a passerby finding the pennies, she set out to find presents left by the universe in the backyard of her home on Tinker Creek. Dillard explained, “I’ve been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises” (1). Dillard’s view of nature in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is both beautiful and sometimes risky and horrible as she sets about finding how to see nature’s gifts by seeing what isn’t seen by the natural eye, by seeing before understanding, and by seeing with the senses by letting go.

 When Dillard begins trying to see the gifts of the universe, she simply looks, being observant as she walks around Tinker Creek. She knows that if you look for clues like the cut wheat-stalks of grain, she will find mice, or if she looks for caterpillar droppings, she should be able to find the caterpillar (Dillard 1). However in the reflective style that is intertwined with her observations, Dillard also realizes that experts or lovers of certain subjects (like experts of mice or horses) are able to see things that the mere observer misses. At one point an airplane flew overhead and its shadow on the creek bottom gave sight to gifts Dillard could not see outside of the shadow. “At once a black fin slit the pink cloud on the water…I saw hints of hulking and underwater shadows, two pale splashes out of the water, and round ripples rolling close…and out of that violet, a sudden enormous black body arced over the water” (Dillard 4). As she reflects on this, she recalled a time when she saw clouds reflected in the water that she could not see in the sky. She later read the explanation that “polarized light from the sky is very much weakened by perfection, but the light in clouds isn’t polarized. So invisible clouds pass among visible clouds, till all slide over the mountains; so a greater light extinguishes a lesser as though it didn’t exist” (Dillard 4). Dillard admits that although this experience led her to see the beauty of the water, she saw it because she stayed out later than was wise. She could have easily walked into a rattlesnake or other creature. Another time she got so caught up in walking hawks through her binoculars that she nearly staggered off a cliff (Dillard 5). As Dillard sought finding the gifts of nature, she tried to relearn how to see before understanding.

Dillard read a book about the experiences of blind patients who had surgery and could then see. They had no understanding of what they were looking at and so saw the world in an entirely different way. Dillard attempted to recreate what they must have seen but learned that it didn’t work as knowledge of what she is seeing is too ingrained. There was a child that “when her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw ‘the tree with the lights in it’” (Dillard 7). Dillard saw the color-patches the newly sighted did for a while, but could not sustain it. She lamented, “But the color-patches of infancy swelled as meaning filled them; they arrayed themselves in solemn ranks down distance which unrolled and stretched before me like a plain. The moon rocketed away. I live now in a world of shadows that take shape and distance color, a world where space makes a kind of terrible sense…the fluttering patch I saw in my nursery window—silver and green and shapeshifting blue—is gone; a row of Lombardy poplars takes its place, mute, across the distant lawn” (Dillard 8). She wishes that the people who had just received their sight would have been given brushes to paint what they were seeing before understanding took over and then we could see that as well (Dillard 8). But there is another type of seeing, she moves on, seeing by letting go and giving into the senses.

Dillard says that letting go is like going from seeing the world through the lens of a camera, looking one from shot to the next, or letting the camera go and allowing everything in. In one moment she was looking into the creek, not seeing much, when she let go and “blurred my eyes and gazed towards the brim of my hat and saw a new world. I saw the pale white circles roll up, roll up, like the world’s tuning, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling scroll of time. Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water. I was the lip of a fountain the creek filled forever” (Dillard 9). She warns that although wonderful, staying in that sense-filled state can lead to a type of madness as it will “flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness” (Dillard 9). Dillard concludes that with all of her searching that “Seeing is a gift and surprise” (9).

Dillard’s search in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek turns out to be an interesting guide to go about seeking the beauty and sometimes horrors of nature by looking at what isn’t normally seen through the natural eye, by trying to glimpse what might be seen without labeling it with our own understanding, and by using our senses and letting go. What Annie Dillard learned is that “although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought…a gift and a total surprise” (9). Dillard searched for years among the peach trees to see the same light the girl who had been blind once saw, but it was when she wasn’t looking and “was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance” (Dillard 9). Just like finding a penny in an unexpected way, the universe gave Annie Dillard the prize she had been seeking all along.

Dillard, Annie. “Seeing.” Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, HarperPerennial, 1974. WayBack Machine, web.archive.org/web/20160702065318/http:/dcrit.sva.edu/wp-content/uploads/1974/01/Seeing.pdf