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English - On the Rainy River - Coggle Diagram
English - On the Rainy River
Morality (Masculinity)(Justification of Cowardice)
"only certainty that summer was moral confusion"
Paradox, again relates back to the oncongruency and paradoxical expectations of masculinity
"Knowledge is always imperfect"
"I saw no unity of purpose, no consensus on matters of philosophy or history or law"
Nature of Courage
"courage comes to us in finite quantities"
"dispensed with all those bothersome little acts of daily courage; it offered hope and grace to the repetitve coward"
Men will seek ways to avoid confronting their own cowardice, seek excuses and external reasons for fear
Cowardice viewed as a plague, men want to avoid it at all costs, but cowardice is defined by those around us and their perception
In the eyes of men, courage only worth it if it is recognsied
Likewise, courage can be cowardice if viewed as such by others
"I was a coward. I went to the war"
Cowardice defined by the perception of others rather than oneself
"all of us... like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly"
Again seeking excuses to justify and avoid recognition of ones own cowardice
"to stop a hitler or some comparable evil... I would've willingly marched off to battle"
"common secret of cowardice"
Nature of Fear
Fear leads to irrationality
O'Brien considering fleeing to Canada, creates semantic field of fear through anaphora of "I feared" or "I was afraid"
Such fear drives his decision to flee to Canada framed as irrational
"Like running a dead end maze"
"pure flight, fast and mindless"
"I had no plan"
"intellect had come up against emotion"
"some irrational and powerful force was resisting, like a weight pushing me towards the war"
unknown force was a fear, particularly a fear of shame and embarrassment, such fear drives the irrational, contradicts the moral
Loss of control comes with fear
"feeling that I've slipped out of my own skin."
"I couldn't get my breath; I couldn't stay afloat; I couldn't tell which way to swim"
Antithesis/jarring imagery
"sunny but cold"
"I tried to smile, except I was crying"
Again refers to the confusion generated by fear, irrationality
Repeated allusion to pigs, "sqealed or wanted to equal but couldn't" when describing fear
This creates a new meaning to the "dense greasy pig-stink"; it represents cowardice, and the way in which O'Brien "couldn't get it out" suggests that fear is difficult to rise above and escape
Again alluding to tunnel and semantic field of calustrohphobia
Fear squeezing in one oneself, difficult to escape
"swallowed up feeling"
"Impossibly heavy"
"very strictest " superlative
comparison of fear to disease, "I felt a sickness inside me. A real disease."