Landscape in Angelas Ashes and Cold Mountain - Book Report/Review Example

Landscape in Angela’s Ashes and Cold Mountain Frank McCourt’s autobiography Angela’s Ashes and Charles Frazier’s novel Cold Mountain both use landscape to reflect the mental state of the characters and show their metaphorical journeys as well as their physical ones. However, each author uses descriptions of the landscape and character interactions with it in a very different way. In Cold Mountain, the landscape is practically a living thing in and of itself. It is richly described in great detail throughout the book. The characters must navigate the landscape and learn to live in peace with it in order to find peace and fulfillment in their lives. In Angela’s Ashes, however, the landscape is very sparsely described. It is ever-present, and the reader is always aware of the dank, gray, urban atmosphere, but McCourt rarely goes into detail describing it. During the course of the narrative of Cold Mountain, one of the protagonists, Inman, must journey across a land that is foreign to him on his way back home. The other protagonist, Ada, is also in a foreign landscape, but that place is Cold Mountain, the home to which Inman is traveling. While Inman must trek across rivers, mountains, and forests to reach Cold Mountain, Ada has to stay there and learn how to live there in harmony with the land. To both Ada and Inman, the landscape is both the antagonist and a symbol of the psychological changes taking place inside of them, in addition to representing the goal towards which the characters strive. As Inman makes his way across the country, in hiding most of the way because he is a deserter from the Confederate army, he is forced to learn to understand the land around him. But the land stands for more than just a place where the story is set. It reflects his moods and serves as a barometer for his psychological state. We know how Inman is feeling based on how he perceives the landscape around him. When Inman is angry or frightened, the land is harsh and frightening. After first escaping from the amry hospital, these are his impressions of the land: It was a foul region, planed off flat except where there were raw gullies cut deep in the red clay. Scrubby pines everywhere. Trees of a better make had once stood in their place but had been cut down long ago, the only evidence of them now an occasional hardwood stump as big around as a dinner table ... What Inman wanted was to be out of there, but the river stretched wide before him, a shit-brown clog to his passage. As a liquid, it bore likeness more to molasses as it first thickens in the making than to water. He wished never to become accustomed to this sorry make of waterway. It did not fit his picture of a river. (Frazier 64) When he is happy and hopeful, he begins to see beauty and the land is transformed into something soft and inviting. Meanwhile, Ada is a city woman who finds herself virtually alone in a rural setting, with only her friend Ruby to guide her. While Ada does not have to trek across great distances, she still has to make a journey. She must learn how to live off the land and fend for herself. When Ada is upset, the land is her enemy, something that is out to get her, which she must conquer if she is to live in Cold Mountain. As things get better, she learns to love the land and live as a part of nature. Her view of the landscape involves noticing all of the tiny details of the workings of nature: Ada stood still and let her eyes go unfocused, and as she did she became aware of the busy movements of the myriad tiny creatures vibrating all through the massed flowers, down the stems and clear to the ground. Insects flying, crawling, climbing, eating. Their accumulation of energy was a kind of luminous quiver of life that filled Ada’s undirected vision right to the edges. (Frazier 108) Frazier spends long passages throughout the book carefully detailing the qualities of the landscape. He describes a world of intense beauty and terrible harshness. The reader gets such a strong sense of being there that it is easy to picture exactly what it is like to live in the world of the book. The characters’ lives are very closely tied to the land. They live or die based on how well they relate to nature. Ada’s state of disconnectedness from her farm, as well as her lack of knowledge about how the systems of nature in her surroundings work, nearly causes her to starve. Likewise, Inman is in danger when he finds himself alone in a strange, distant landscape. He knows the rhythms of life of Cold Mountain, but now he must learn how to successfully interact with the places he travels across in order to survive. In the end, Inman and Ada both finally find peace with the land of Cold Mountain. Ada learns to live with it, and Inman dies there. To Ada, it represents a good life and her “happily ever after,” and to Inman, it represents heaven, the spiritual reward he receives at the end of his transformative journey. In Angela’s Ashes, the surrounding landscape also represents the psychological state of the characters. Unlike in Cold Mountain, however, the characters and their mood never changes very much. Things go from bleak to bleaker to even bleaker. Set in urban locales, the characters don’t necessarily live in harmony with nature in the same way that Ada and Inman did. Nevertheless, the gray city walls and constant moldy dampness is in balance with the feelings of Francis and his family. The story begins in New York City during the great depression, and things are not great for the McCourt family. The sense the author gives of Brooklyn in that era is one of a busy, crowded, unforgiving place. While very little physical description is given, the reader still gets a sense of what the city feels like. When the family moves to Limerick, Ireland, the mood becomes much darker. Rather than go into long, detailed, beautifully worded descriptions of the setting the way that Charles Frazier does, Frank McCourt manages to communicate the feeling of the setting and paint a picture using brief, terse words thrown in to the narrative, seemingly without forethought. While Frazier makes his descriptive passages wholly about the land, McCourt slips the few little words about the landscape in to sentences about other things, so that the reader gets a sense of the place without even really realizing that McCourt has described it to them. The McCourt family has a similar relationship with the landscape to Ada and Inman in that the land is one of many antagonistic forces faced by the family. However, they never achieve the peace and balance with their surroundings that the characters in Cold Mountain do. In one of the most bitter ironies in the story, Frank’s mother Angela has one of a few happy moments when she gets to show her family the Shannon river, a sight she has longed to see for a very long time. It’s one of the few passages in the book where McCourt goes into detail in the description, showing just how strongly the sight affected him and how much it stayed with him. Of it, he says: Beyond the dock road there was something wide and dark with lights glinting in it. Mam says that’s the River Shannon. She says that’s what she missed most in America, the River Shannon. The Hudson was lovely but the Shannon sings. I can’t hear the song but my mother does and that makes her happy. (69). Yet very soon after, the children become sick and Oliver dies, ostensibly because of fog and dampness from the Shannon River that caused infection of the lungs and pneumonia. The incident with the river that killed the baby Oliver illustrates the sense of hopelessness that the family experienced throughout the book. Each time something made any one of them happy, it was quickly ripped away, leaving behind a growing sense of hopelessness and despair. The weather plays a major part in the book. The constant rain and dampness can be seen to stand for the unchanging psychological state of the McCourt family. The dampness not only endangered them physically, it also wore them down emotionally, piling on to their already serious state of depression. McCourt describes the dampness: Out in the Atlantic Ocean great sheets of rain gathered to drift slowly up the River Shannon and settle forever in Limerick. The rain dampened the city from the Feast of the Circumcision to New Year’s Eve. It created a cacophony of hacking coughs, bronchial rattles, asthmatic wheezes, consumptive croaks. It turned noses into fountains, lungs into bacterial sponges. (10-11) It’s this dampness and the implied gray, sunless feeling that pervades the emotional state of the entire book. While McCourt and Frazier use two very different methods of creating a sense of place in their respective books, both skillfully use setting as an important tool for storytelling. Without the landscapes described in these books, the stories would not remotely have the same meaning. In this way, the authors use two very different styles of the same device to bring their stories to life. Works Cited McCourt, Frank. Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir. New York: Touchstone, 1996. Print. Frazier, Charles. Cold Mountain. New York: Grove Press, 1997. Print. Read More