Indian Horse blogs
Impact of a first person narrator?
I think the choice of having Saul as the narrator was the right one. It makes the story much more dramatic and fluent. Telling the experience from a third or second person would not have such a personal impact on the reader. Saul describes his time at the residential schools with much more impact than any other perspective. It makes the reader really sympathize and feel what he is going through. I think Richard Wagamese chose to do this for that reason. He wanted the story to feel more raw and dramatic. It really portrays how the indigenous people felt in those terrible residential schools. The quality of the story also improves a lot because you can slowly feel the anger building up in Saul until he cannot take it anymore.
Having the story told by in a first person perspective makes some positives and some negatives. When Saul returns to the Gods Lake and he has the hallucinations of his family, it makes the reader really understand the struggle of his life. At the same time it blocks the reader from really knowing what is going on, not just from Saul's point of view. When a hockey game is going on, the perspective of Saul only shows what is happening when he is on the ice and small amounts of time when he has the puck. Most of the games the moose play are shortly summarized up to: we won, or,we lost. Although first person writing can make the story much for personal and make the reader really empathize for the protagonist, it can make the story somewhat one-sided and less about anything else that goes on in the lives of the enemies or subsequent characters. Most first person stories do well in capturing just the life of the main character, but I have read some books where there was just too much information about the main character and basically none about anybody else. This can make the story really long. My question is do you think that Richard Wagamese chose the right perspective to tell the story from, if not, why?
Sauls actions/Was Saul fated to live that way?
Saul's actions in Indian Horse directly reflect his experience at St. Jerome's and the way he was treated. His hockey game in the beginning was respectful and sportsmanlike. Slowly he begun to give into the bullies and eventually he snapped and resorted to violence against everything that upset him. Although hockey is a very violent sport, there are far more players that went out of their way to bully and pick on Saul. It is not his fault that he was born indigenous. Although indigenous people did not deserve to be treated this way, it was still a reality for them. Since Saul was born indigenous, he automatically was fated to live the same way as all the previous indigenous peoples.
I feel like Saul was slowly starting to crack under the pressure of his hockey team depending on him to score but to also fight back at the people who were intentionally seeking to hurt him in games. Saul was fated to live like this. Not even in the hockey game but even outside the rink such as went he went foresting. The other guys in the cabin picked on him until one night he snapped and knocked the guy out cold.
A question to stimulate thinking: If Saul had just went with the flow and stayed with hockey, could he have made it big and paved the way for indigenous peoples in the future?
In summary I think that Indian Horse was a great book to read, based on the fact that this entire coursed is based off the focus on human rights. I enjoyed reading the book and found myself reading chapters at a time over what we were supposed to read weekly and ended up finishing the book early. The twist about Father Leboutillier near the end left me speechless and made the entire rest of the story seem so much different. It really piled on to the rest of the heavy content in this book, making it a big example of human rights abuses, and a great book with lots of possible questions, and good thesis statements.
The topic of my essay was the violence in the novel. It spoke to me the most because when I read the novel it was the most prominent theme that stuck out.