Under the ribs of death and what it means to be a Canadian - Book Report/Review Example

Under the Ribs of Death and What It Means to be a Canadian Submitted] Introduction Canada is a land whose occupants could trace their origins to immigrants coming from different parts of the world most of which came from Europe. Nowadays, the country is seeing a wave of immigrants from North America and Asia as well. This nature of being immigrants and the experiences the immigrants had in the past were portrayed in John Marlyn's Under the Ribs of Death. Set in the immigrant community of Winnipeg's North End, Under the Ribs of Death follows the progress of young Sandor Hunyadi as he struggles to cast off his Hungarian background and become a "real Canadian." Embittered by poverty and social humiliation, Sandor rejects his father's impractical idealism and devotes himself single-mindedly to becoming a successful businessman. Equipped with a new name and a hardened heart, he is close to realizing his ambition when fortune's wheel takes an unexpected - and possibly redemptive - turn. Combining social realism and moral parable, Under the Ribs of Death is John Marlyn's ironic portrayal of the immigrant experience in the years leading up to the Great Depression. As a commentary on the problems of cultural assimilation, this novel is as relevant today as it was when first published in 1957. Since its publication, Under the Ribs of Death has been recognized as a vivid recreation of Winnipeg's multiethnic North End in the 1920s, a subtle analysis of racial prejudice and its consequences, and the first significant revelation of Hungarian immigrant experience in English Canada. In the story, we see the bitterness that Hungarian immigrants were compelled to endure as against the lavishness of those other nationalities that had the opportunity of arriving there first. The social divide was underpinned in the story thru the statement of the main character who said the following: "The English," he whispered. "Pa, the only people who count are the English. Their fathers got all the best jobs. They're the only ones nobody ever calls foreigners. Nobody ever makes fun of their names or calls them, 'Baloney-eaters,' or laughs at the way they dress or talk." "Nobody," he concluded bitterly, "cause when you're English it's the same as being Canadian." The Novel and Being Canadian Under the Ribs of Death is often considered a bildungsroman in which the usual conflict between generations is exacerbated by the protagonist's association of his parents' Hungarian culture and humane values with grinding poverty and persecution, and the dominant culture and commercialism with success and fulfillment. The young Sandor Hunyadi, rejecting his exploited, long-suffering father, fantasizes that his real father is an English lord and dreams of becoming English, rich, and powerful. When he gets his first job cutting grass in, to him, paradisiacal River Heights, he gives his name as Alex Humphrey, for its "quiet English elegance"; when he enters the cutthroat world of business, he rejects that name as "too soft ... too harmless" and becomes Alex Hunter, painstakingly practicing a signature in which the lower-case letters look "something like the teeth of a buzz-saw." His strong desire to be assimilated engenders a mass of contradictions. He resents the English who coolly maneuver him into admitting his Hungarian origins, yet he worships the successful Hungarian Nagy, who exploits him more cruelly than the English. He considers the English Lawson's lack of prejudice against him a sign of weakness. Falling in love with his childhood playmate Mary Kostenuik, he reflects, "You'd never think from looking at her that her parents were foreigners." Just as Alex seems about to achieve his dream of moving with his wife to River Heights, the 1929 stock-market crash occurs. Alex, unemployed in the ensuing Depression, trying to sell a couple of wicker baskets to buy stamps, stationery, and newspapers to apply for jobs, sees his dream house in River Heights "empty and deserted ... gaping with the vacancy of death." From childhood gang fights to manhood Sandor/Alex has ruthlessly crushed his humane instincts, which, in expressionistic nightmares, he fears threaten to destroy him, like the rat he crushes in terror with a shovel in his slum tenement. In the end, when the whole world seems a wasteland, he looks into his little son's eyes and "is filled ... with a gladness such as he had rarely known, because in those mild depths ... were all those things, miraculously alive, which he had suppressed in himself, stifled for the sake of what he had almost felt within his grasp, out there, over his son's head, out and beyond in the grey desolation." In the images of Ezekiel 37 and from Milton's Comus (lines 560-562), he has discovered a soul "Under the ribs of death." For all its local color and documentary realism, its kaleidoscopic vision of Hungarian festivities amid the drabness and cruelty of slum subsistence, and its terror of confrontation with oneself, the novel is primarily a powerful affirmation of the mystery of life. Deconstructing the Implications to Canadian Nature Under the Ribs of Death, written by John Marlyn and published in 1957, occupies an unusual place in Canadian literature best defined by those spaces that it seems to hang between. It is taught but nowhere near as often as solidly canonical novels like those written by Davies, Atwood, Ondaatje, Findley, and Lawrence, for example. The composition has been regarded as the first Canadian book to have confronted the public with the experiences of an immigrant population other than the dominant Anglo-Saxon and Germanic communities, and thus give a voice to ethnic cultures outside the Canadian 'mainstream.' We see how the condition of being at once inside and outside defines the immigrant experience as described by Marlyn through his protagonist, Sandor. This is like arriving in the place and trying to fit in but feeling alienated. The novel's literary status has come to mirror, and thus highlight, the immigrant's location in the Canadian national narrative. In other words, immigration certainly has a role in the story of how Canada came to be a nation, but to what extent is the immigrant allowed to take part in that narrative The historical events that have had some of the greatest effects on Canada's construction as an independent nation--World War I, the post-war boom years, the Great Depression--are almost always referred to in critical analyses of Under the Ribs of Death. As readers and critics, we clearly understand the events of the novel within a national historical framework; that is to say, we read the protagonist's experiences as being related to these specific historical events in our national narrative despite the fact that the protagonist's (first-person) narrative does not refer to them by name. A close reading of the text would reveal how the protagonist, a boy from a Hungarian immigrant family who grows to manhood in and around Winnipeg's north end, identifies and goes about obtaining the identity of a Canadian man and joining a national brotherhood. In the novel, we can think of the making of a Canadian man from an immigrant boy as allegorically representing Canada's "manly maturation" after its colonial boyhood. Under the Ribs of Death reveals how the allegory of manly maturation has become more complex and considerably less optimistic than the turn-of-the-century British imperial model exemplified in another composition also about Canadian experiences which is entitled as The Foreigner. Specifically, an "immigrant son' like Sandor, can no longer become a celebrated Canadian man by learning the ropes from a rugged Canadian rancher and a Presbyterian minister, marrying the daughter of a Scottish CPR shareholder and becoming a successful miner. In Under the Ribs of Death, the "immigrant son" does not find a positive British father figure to guide him to a Canadian identity/prosperity. By the novel's end, Sandor is penniless and virtually without any sense of identity. Despite this, Sandor, standing in his father's house, looks upon his son and sees "all those things, miraculously alive, which he had suppressed in himself". This ending is the subject of some debate. Some feel that it is simply too positive, and thus not in keeping with the overall tone of the novel, while others find that hopefulness and a nurturing sense of family are a logical conclusion because they offer the only way out of Sandor's crisis. In this ending alone, we find a positive thread by suggesting that Sandor recognizes his place in a "genealogical continuity" by considering his connection to his father and son. In doing so, Coleman argues, Sandor replaces national paternity (and its exclusive, oppressive imperialist standards) with genealogical paternity. I suggest, though, that this argument should take into account the fact that Sandor's relationships with his son and father are only two of the many relationships he has with boys and men--men who are not his father, and thus offer variations on the paternal role, and disrupt the construction of a carefully balanced and peaceful genealogical progression. These relationships between males--paternal and otherwise--are fraught with disappointment, conflict, doubt, and reticence and thus offer some doubt as to whether maturation--personal or national--can even be considered a possibility in such a context. Sandor's paternal relationships (his connections with individual older men who might provide him with some form of mentoring) seem utterly incapable of helping him gain entry into a very exclusive "Canadian" identity. He comes to understand that certain groups, or brotherhoods, grant a more entitled national status than any of his available father figures possibly can. Therefore, Sandor attempts to work his way into a Canadian identity without the benefit of "legitimized" (i.e., British Canadian) male mentoring and the distinctive maturation it engenders. This travail can be read as representative of the male immigrant's struggle to become an "entitled" Canadian at the same time as the country itself moves into a more modem, independent identity. By extending our scope beyond the novel's paternal relationships to include a consideration of the "brothers" within Marlyn's cast of masculinities, we become more aware of how the Canadian immigrant's experience may be read in a broader context- beyond the lineage of fathers and sons, into the wide-ranging brotherhoods (e.g., political, social, military) of man. My View of Being a Canadian The 1970 Immigration Act states that: "To ensure that any person who seeks admission to Canada in either a permanent or temporary basis is subject to standards of admission that do not discriminate on grounds of race, national or ethnic origin, color, religion or sex." In spite of these, there have been much debate which focuses on whether to continue accepting immigrants and endowing them the rights enjoyed by the native population. Those against argue that the immigrants who had helped shape Canada into its standing in world affairs had to prevail over tremendous hardships. To allow immigrants into the country would seem like giving somebody all your hard earned money. This point of view of those who do not want to accept immigrants any longer were typical of the discrimination that Sandor of the novel and all his co-nationalities had experience. Those who were first should be entitled to more rights and resources. The truth of the matter, however, is that Canada is a land of immigrants. Being immigrants by nature, we should therefore take into consideration the condition of new immigrants who are gambling everything just to have a life that is worth living. In the end, our nationality is not what is important. It is the thought that someday we will be looking at the eyes of those we accepted and see the hope they carry for our country. References: Marlyn, John (1990 ed) Under the Ribs of Death. Random House Publications. U.S. Read More