MARCH 8TH CLASS NOTES

Class Notes March 08, 2011

From page 7 in the text.

The arbiter of nineteenth-century literary realism in America was William Dean Howells. He defined realism as "nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material,"

Norman Vincent Peal – his approach to America


“But at the end of the century came a generation of writers whose ideas of the workings of the universe…”

Notice the phrase the “workings of the universe”; something you will have to understand about the Naturalism, they have a different conception of the universe.

Realists are realists, they still believe that God is in charge over the universe; this is not the case with Naturalism.

“…and whose perception of society's disorders led them to naturalism, a new and harsher realism.”


“America's literary naturalists scorned the idea that literature [that would] present comforting moral truths. Instead, naturalist writers attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic [status]”

In some ways we will see; in a way not some much in “The Blue Hotel”, but we are certainly going to see it with Jack London’s; we’ve got like tribal societies… you’ll see that.

“…low social and economic classes who were dominated by their environment and heredity.”

Now these are the two key things I will talk more about them in a minute… but you don’t have any will of your own to make your life; no your will is dominated by heredity and by environment, in other words, genetics and what you are taught and what is your condition; now this is the Naturalists view. Naturalists emphasized the world was a-moral if you act against morals, you are immoral. Amoral means there’s just no morals, no God, no morality. That men or women had no free will. That religious truths were illusionary. That the destiny of humanity was the misery in life, oblivion in death.

Destiny of humanity was misery in life; you were born; you suffered; you died. Naturalism like realism came from Europe; In America it had been shaped by the Civil War; and the teachings of Charles Darwin. Darwinism suggested that people are dominated by irresitable forces of evolution.

“…pessimism and deterministic ideas of naturalism pervaded the works of such writers as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, Henry Adams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Theodore Dreiser. They wrote detailed descriptions of the lives of the downtrodden; they offered frank treatment of human passion and sexuality; they portrayed men and women overwhelmed by the blind forces of nature–all of which had a powerful influence on modern writers. Realism and naturalism remained popular with writers at the turn of the century. Writers of the early 1900s…”

We’ll pick it up with Faulkner; we’ll pick it up with Steinbeck;



Jack London Biography

He we have Charles Darwin; a British Naturalist; in 1859 wrote “The Origins of the Spicies”. You would think that the book was published in 1859 and everyone would have had a chance to read it and talk about it… no! It really wasn’t widely disseminated until almost the end of the century. What happended was it almost got put aside completely, it almost just sort of faded out.

Herbert Spencer who coined the phrase “Survival of the Fittest”. He helped to popularize eveolution; he was one of the founders of sociology.

Carl Marx, of course came along too. In 1883 he is writing “The Communist Manifesto” It’s called “The History of all Hitherto Existing Society, The History of Class Struggle”; Communism.

Fredrick Niche – The three most famous words he ever spoke… “God Is Dead”. He’s a German philosopher and is writing in a way that is earth shaking. He had a tremendous affect on people.

Now this is a time when tre

He is also influenced by the Communist Manifesto.

At this time, it was generally thought that the world was created in 4004BC. Along comes Darwin in 1859 and says that the Earth is millions of years old. All species had evolved from a common beginning.

In the 1600 _____ said that the Universe went on forever & ever, and that meant that there was no room for Heaven, which meant that he was a heretic; then burned at the stake.

Now science begins to dominate; theorists, and of course there is outrage. He is denounced, Origin of the Species is denounced and considered complete heresy. If Darwin was the of evelotion, then Herbert Spencer was its philosopher.

He spent _____ years writing “The Synthetic Philosophy”; It’s a huge work with all of these volumes, what he’s trying to do is

A fundamental law of social as well as physical.

Evolution of society,
His general intent is from simple and general uniform intent
Involving increasingly complex social

The simple ____ to the complex; now the complex is going to be
Society is going to be more stable.

Now Darwinism has come under a lot of fire, a lot of scientists, especially biologists, tend to
You


Now what Stephen Crane and Jack London saw was… they tried to apply these laws to individuals as well as social organizations. There is a social struggle for existence. If you apply evolution to society evolving, well you are going to get remember the Darwinian principal, the strong are going to survive and the weak are going to be weeded out. In our society you can have child labor poverty war, which was rampant at the time, because that’s all okay, the strong will survive and overcome that.


Now to have this figure social struggle, remember,

This ruthless quest for power, this giant of a man, selection of the fittest by crushing the weak and the helpless. Superman appeals so much to acerian thinking that of course the german Philospepher ed to

Niche; most of the times they are portrayed as ferocious Vikings; the Germans portrayed them as the Airien race. We they talk about heredity, they are talking about race. At the same time you’ve got the communist manifesto, and at the same time you got evolution of society.

It’s being challenged by the society of communism; Communism says that the working man of the world, helpless downtrodden weak victims, should unite and over through the exploiters and the oppressors; the industrial ruling class. Now they didn’t look at the ruling class as people with money as being the fittest, they looked at them as having the money; so if we unite we’ll have more power to fight them off.

According to the followers of Marx, not the super man individualist, but the socialist must be the instrument of socialist evolution. This guy had complex ideas; and youknow, these things are just developing, people are dealing with these things for the first time and.

We’ll look at Jack London and see how he uses it; and we are going to see about Crane, we will focus more on Crane, London we will see.

Now I want to talk to you at the bottom of the page Literary Naturalism; its and outgrowth of Realism; Naturalist writers were influenced by evolution; they believe heredity and surrounding defines ones character. Realism seeks to describe subjects as they really are. Naturalism attempts to determine scientifically the underlying forces, the environment, the heredity influencing these individuals’ actions. Now you might think that generally our educational system; you are a blank slate; you are born; you are taught stuff; you develop on your own; you have your own ideas. In the 19th century, heredity was looked upon, if your father was a murderer, then you don’t want to marry someone who’s father is a murderer, because then they
Bad person it’s a hereditary thing; well you know, then… over the last twenty-thirty years they did a whole host of tests of identical twins. One goes to California, one goes to New York; they don’t know each other, they are reunited in there twenties or thirties; there is a whole series of

Guess what, these people married women with the same name; they had dogs, they had the same kind of dogs, they named the dogs the same. They smoked the same brand of cigarettes; they do this they do that. It’s endless, its frightening. This is statistically impossible. What are you going to say, something to do with genes. Its inherited, so how much do you
How much is working out of your genetic makeup. They may not have been that wrong with what they were saying. There’s more to it tan what we think other

These are the two things that Naturalists are going to push.

Naturalists work off of uncouth or sorted subject matter. Now the French writer Neil Zola the great French naturalist writer. He was writing all this time, he was writing about uneducated people working down in coal mines, and all the things that were happening about prostitutes and all this stuff. The French is very descriptive of all this stuff. Now of course Stephen crane; who I am going to talk to you about in a few minutes, wrote the first American Naturalistic novel called “Maggie, the Girl of the Streets” Its about a prostitute who dies of syphilis.

Determinism is the theory that here in actions are controlled by antecedents. Cause that will not let you exercise freewill. Causes that happen before you do something. Your heredity, your genetic causes or the environment has conditioned you. That’s pretty limited; its so limited that naturalism couldn’t go on for very long. There is a limit as to how many low life characters you can write about.


STEPHEN CRANE

Page 786
The guy is 28 years old; he died very young. His father was a Methodist preacher in Newark, New jersey. His father shifted from one parish to another ~every two years. He is the 14th child in the family. He was the fourteenth and last child born to the couple. His mother was a elected President and a popular spokeswoman for the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of Asbury Park.

Crane didn’t like it very much, he eventually left the church.

At the age of 14 he left Asbury Park, and

Crane was considered a rebel and was hostile toward formal education and decided that he wanted to get out and study humanity by itself. Part of this was a rebellion against his mother spending all of this time with ______ he didn’t like it. Stephen Crane is very candid regardless of any conventions; he will attack.

He likes low life people; he went to New York and wrote Maggie; it was the first American Naturalist novel. He went to the slums; hung out in the slums; they call it the slums, there was a big Irish; at this point in time the immigration came from Ireland; they had the potato famine and all this stuff; and uneducated Irish people, he went in to the east side of Manhattan. The the stories about ; all the drinking bouts, and all this stuff that happens, this family called the Johnsons it’s a scene of fight for survival. She is somebody that blossoms in a mud puddle; she is a pretty girl, she is affected by her surroundings; she later works in a factory and this guy she meets he is a bar tender, he is her knight in shining armor; he ends up seducing her and then he gets her pregnant. He seduces her; gets her pregnant and abandons her; and of course the family throws her out. She has to become a prostitute to survive. It’s a pretty grim novel.

“The environment is a tremendous thing in the world, because she herself is romantic and weak, (that’s her nature, her heredity, her back ground), also because nobody is interested in her fate and how she redeems herself by committing suicide, her only possible escape from a life of moral degradation. She drowns herself in the East River. Anyway, this is the first Naturalistic novel, it’s about prostitution and this sort of thing.

Crane writes about what he knows; he sort of does some research on this.

He writes a famous civil war story “The Red Badge of Courage”. It was considered the most realistic account of the war ever written by a realist Union Army. The surprising thing was that Crane was never in the army. But actually what he did was he interviewed a whole lot of people about the war and as a result, most people thought he had been in the war. He did go to the Spanish American War, there he wrote the “Open Boat”; and he said, “

Crane died of Tuberculosis at 28. He ended up in the sanitarium for rest; they didn’t have any penicillin at that time.

Part of this thing with researching “Maggie” he became familiar with prostitutes; the police in NY at the time were very corrupt; you did not want to mess with the police. He wrote an article exposing the police treatment; shaking down the prostitutes and all this other stuff, and the corruption of the police. They were going to kill him. They would have killed him; he left NY and went down to Florida, and writing all this stuff, he wore himself out. He was writing so much that when he went to Cuba for the Spanish American war, he began to get this lung disease.

“…in June 1900, after traveling to a German sanitarium to seek a cure, Crane died. He was twenty-eight.”

“…He has been viewed as an uncompromising determinist, a literary naturalist who saw human beings as wholly controlled by their environment and heredity.”




P.790 Poetic Quote


THE BLUE HOTEL

First published in 1898

The effect that the frontier has had on the

Turner was more concerned than Crane by “The process by which American society evolved from savagery to civilization”. Out in the west it was still going on. The phenomenon of the western frontier. He writes about it; Turner’s theory of the relationship of the American character (what makes you an American), and the harsh environment that shaped it. He’s thought
He’s like and economist in some ways. There is a legend of frontier individualism. Rested on what people thought should be true; rather than what was true. The west was in truth an area where cooperation was just as essential as the inevitable conflict between unrestrained individualism and the moral complex needs of

You don’t think of that; a lot of people don’t think of that, every man for himself, western individualist. But... he points out that there was a lot of cooperation going on there too.

Now we see that there is a conflict in the Blue Hotel.

Social economic eveloution; even more basic, commercial evolution, from a primitive society ranging up to farming. We’ve got an example of that in the Blue Hotel; it’s Scully. Scully is on his way to achieving this, He wants to achieve ______ civilized. And he is going to be at the heart of this story, you are going to see.

Someone hired Crane to go out to Nebraska and write brochures to come out and settle there. When Crane goes out there, they just had a severe draught. This began in the summer of 1894, he went out in 1895. There was a condition of despair; there had been no rain fall. Between 1880 & 1890 the population of Nebraska had increased 180%. The population went from over 450,000 to over a million. In January of 1895 the process of exodus; eastward. All people were leaving; they were fleeing Nebraska because of all this drought, and these severe winters.

He is in a rooming house in Eddyville; which is where we believe the Blue Hotel was located. He sees this light blue hotel. It was painted so loathsum that some dire action has to take place.

It was in economic depression. Crane get’s in the middle of a fight, and is arrested on charges of interfering with a barroom fight. Crane pushed himself between a very tall man who was pounding a rather small one. This was a local custom; these men fought each and every night. Their friends expected it. I was a darn nuisance with my eastern scruples and all that, so first everybody cursed me fully then they took me off to the Judge who told me that I was an imbicile

Violence plays a big part in this story;
Page one in the opening;

“Pat Scully, the proprietor, had proved himself a master of strategy when he chose his paints.”

He painted the Hotel Blue to attract people’s attention.

And the second paragraph down;

“…it was Scully's habit to go every morning and evening to meet the leisurely trains that stopped at Romper and work his seductions upon any man that he might see wavering,…” “One morning, when a snow-crusted engine dragged its long string of freight cars and its one passenger coach to the station, Scully performed the marvel of catching three men. One was a shaky and quick-eyed Swede, with a great shining cheap valise; one was a tall bronzed cowboy, who was on his way to a ranch near the Dakota line; one was a little silent man from the East, who didn't look it, and didn't announce it. Scully practically made them prisoners.”


Now remember I told you there was a great divide among the east and the west. The guys been a salesman for a long time, he’s accustom to this but he’s not the new guy. There is one new guy and that’s the Swede. Look how he set the stage for it…

“At last Scully, elaborately, with boisterous hospitality, conducted them through the portals of the blue hotel. The room which they entered was small. It seemed to be merely a proper temple for an enormous stove, which, in the center, was humming with godlike violence.”

Even the stove has violence. And look at this game; I don’t know if you paid any attention to initially to the game that is going on. This game is going on between Scully’s son Johnny and this old farmer. And if you notice, when they come in, they were quarrelling. There’s a little bit of violence going on here too.

“They were quarreling. Frequently the old farmer turned his face toward a box of sawdust—colored brown from tobacco juice—that was behind the stove, and spat with an air of great impatience and irritation.” With a loud flourish of words Scully destroyed the game of cards,…”

Scully brings all these people in and gives them this basis of cold water. The other people throw cold water on themselves, but the Swede…

“…merely dipped his fingers gingerly and with trepidation. It was notable that throughout this series of small ceremonies the three travelers were made to feel that Scully was very benevolent. He was conferring great favors upon them.”

He’s showing them how civilized he is. The whole process; Scully’s whole motivation is to convince these people that they are in a civilized place. He’s the proprietor of the hotel. When he goes up stairs he going to talk about civilization and how the place is civilized.

“Afterward they went to the first room, and, sitting about the stove, listened to Scully's officious clamor at his daughters, who were preparing the midday meal.”

“The Swede said nothing. He seemed to be occupied in making furtive estimates of each man in the room. One might have thought that be had the sense of silly suspicion which comes to guilt. He resembled a badly frightened man.”

Now he’s the outsider, and he’s afraid. When we go on we see that he is very much afraid. He’s scared that he is going to be killed. He’s conditioned; he’s conditioned by his heredity and environment in a different way. He’s not one of the westerner’s, he’s from the outside.

What Crane is doing in the Blue Hotel, (one way of looking at it), he is unmasking this kind of social cultural situation. Significant economic forces operate beneath the social surface.
If you look at Scully, he is doing everything he can to show how this place is economically prosperous. There is a powerful assumption that a peaceful order is going on now. It’s not the Wild West anymore.

Think about Scully, he’s like a priestly entrepreneur. He has the most to gain and the most to lose in this fragile economic situation. Now for Scully he works the hardest in both language and act to ____ were not incarnate here, we are peaceful; we are civilized here. We are a civilized society; everything he is doing he is trying to reach out.

Now that he captured the cowboy the easterner and the Swede at the railroad station, he ushers them in and begins all this hospitality. With this God=like violent stove going on. When he came in, Johnny and the Old Farmer are in a pretty violent game of High Five. He sort of destroyed it. When you look at the Swede, the Swede merely dips his finger gingerly with trepidation. His acts represent a mythical view of the west. The west is a violent place, a bad place.

The Easterner will say “Why is he so afraid?”

They can’t understand why the Swede believes that

The Swede he’s an outsider; he’s not part of the group. Even the Easterner has been in the West for a long time, he’s not an outsider. It’s reinforced by a narrative voice.

“He seemed to be occupied in making furtive estimates of each man in the room. One might have thought that be had the sense of silly suspicion which comes to guilt. He resembled a badly frightened man.”

It’s clearly coming out this way.

They can’t figure him out; he has a different ideology and a different view point.


“…he said that some of these Western communities were very dangerous; and after his statement he straightened his legs under the table, tilted his head, and laughed again, loudly. It was plain that the demonstration had no meaning to the others. They looked at him wondering and in silence.”

Immediately following this there are many failed attempts to coop the Swede into getting him to play the game. Be for the Swede joins the game of high five; look what’s going on; there is a storm outside, the fury of the game that he is getting into. Before the Swede goes upstairs, it is pretty obvious that he is scared to death.


"They say they don't know what I mean," he remarked mockingly to the Easterner. The latter answered after prolonged and cautious reflection. "I don't understand you," he said, impassively.”




We’ll see, he was looking to the Easterner, because he thought, the Easterner is not one of the Westerner guy’s, he’s one of us, he’s from the East; he’s going to admit this is a dangerous place. He’s seeking his support, but he doesn’t get it. The Swede announced that he…

“…encountered treachery from the only quarter where he had expected sympathy if not help. "Oh, I see you are all against me. I see."

And then:

“… The Swede sprang up with the celerity of a man escaping from a snake on the floor. "I don't want to fight!" he shouted. "I don't want to fight!"

Everybody completely doesn’t understand what’s going on.

“The Swede backed rapidly toward a corner of the room. His hands were out protectingly in front of his chest, but he was making an obvious struggle to control his fright. "Gentlemen," he quavered, "I suppose I am going to be killed before I can leave this house! I suppose I am going to be killed before I can leave this house."

Scully comes in and says; “What’s going on…” The Swede says;

"These men are going to kill me." "Kill you!" ejaculated Scully. "Kill you! What are you talkin'?"

"Kill you?" said Scully again to the Swede. "Kill you? Man, you're off your nut."

They have this discussion and the Swede decides to go upstairs because his intention is to go up and get his bags and leave. Scully doesn’t want him to leave, he wants the customer.


Scully follows the Swede upstairs; look at what Scully talks about, look at how he tries to convince him that this is a civilized place. Scully is the guy who has the most to lose from this.

Look at section 4…

"Why, he's frightened!" The Easterner knocked his pipe against a rim of the stove. "He's clear frightened out of his boots." "What at?" cried Johnnie and cowboy together. The Easterner reflected over his answer. "What at?" cried the others again. "Oh, I don't know, but it seems to me this man has been reading dime-novels, and he thinks he's right out in the middle of it—the shootin' and stabbin' and all."

Now dime novels at that time were spread all through the east. They were novels about Billy the Kid; Wild Bill Hickok; and gun fights; the same thing you get in Western movies. They were killing everyone in these novels; the Swede was conditioned by that; he read them, and he thought that way. People in the East thought that’s what was going on.

In Section 5…

The Swede is now in the game and he calls Johnny a cheat; accuses him of cheating at cards.

Prior to this the old farmer and Johnny were playing High Five. The Old Farmer was mad and irritated at him too. Now here’s Johnny and he won’t fight. Now Scully doesn’t want him to fight; this is violence; it’s not what he’s there for. Finally he is going to let him fight. They go outside to have this fight; the Swede is afraid that they are all going to jump on him and


Not the attitudes of Scully and how it changes. There was a point where he didn’t want him to fight but now he is really into it. He wants’ him to be killed. The section where the cowboy talks about…

The Swede wins the fight.

Section 7… on to Section 8…

The Swede brings on his own demise. There is no question about it. Crane plainly attributes the Swede’s death to social cultural causes. The moral failure arising on those causes. The environment itself is what traps him.

The Swede aggravates the gambler; he pushes the guy provokes the guy and promotes violence.

The Swede’s views about violence turn out to be more accurate about his true convictions. At the end of the story, the easterner explains who was right and who was wrong.

It wasn’t just that the Swede was paranoid; it was more to it than that. The way things were and the way they thought.

This story is about violence.




Jack London

Go to page 873; jack London’s bio. He is reading the works of Darwin; Whitman; and also the works of Carl Marx. They are competing ideas. London was really a strong but untutored mind. He, He read Darwin, he read books on social Darwinism. He is torn between individual ism and socialism. He was inspired by the American dream of success. He had a strange life to say the least. His off spring
Flora was this Welch woman who had been stricken by typhus; to say that she was unstable and unbalance was being kind. And then Cheany who was this weird intellectual guy who remembered everything he ever read word for word. He always denied that he fathered Jack London; he said he wasn’t his father, even though everyone said that he looked like him; she was living with him. He inclined to believe he was his father. But, he believed in the use of astrology, with mankind improved social conditions; with Flora, was an ardent spiritualist; I mean she ran séances; she had this table _____ she did this for a living. She wanted to marry him because she wanted a father for the child. When she was pregnant with him, Chenney said that he wasn’t the father. She either attempted to commit suicide or pretended to do it. He leaves and she marries Jack London. She names the child John Griffith London. She married John London so she named him Jack London. Jack sort of lived hand to mouth. He had a spotty primary education because he was working one job after another; because he was heloing support the family. When he was thirteen; he bought a small boat and learned how to sail in San Francisco bay. When he was fourteen, he got a bigger boat and became an expert sailor. The reason he is doing this is because he is getting money by being an oyster pirate.

He had a gang of small boat oyster pirates that raided the beds and steal the oysters and sell them to the stores and markets. He made a lot of money that way. T fifteen he had a mistress, he bought a boat called the “Razzle Dazzle” and he began at the age of fifteen to drink very heavily. He seemed to thrive on it because he wrote an incredible number of novels. At the same time he was devouring books he read all the time; he got at the library. He moves from being an oyster pirate to becoming a member of the State fish patrol at the age of sixteen because he knew all the names of the pirates. So they hired him to work for the State to arrest illegal fishing.

At seventeen he ships out on a sailing vessel, he goes to the south pacific; there he returns to California. He joins this army that marches on Washington. Industrial army; he’s thrown in jail. He comes back because the march fails. He becomes a hobo. He served time in prison for vagrancy. He saw the seamy side of life. He does all this and comes back and goes to high school at the age of 19 after doing that. He helps publish a school magazine. He becomes a devote socialist; he gets thrown in jail for speaking in a park without a license. The newspapers reported on him as a combination of a devil and maniac.

He goes to the University of California; he was popular with a small group of students, who were sort of rebels. He would spend 15 hours a day writing manuscripts for college and afterwards to sell. He borrowed a lot of money from his step sister and embarked to the Klondike; up north to the gold rush. London came home a year later; didn’t have a single ounce of gold. He had a bunch of notebooks and plans in his head for stories. He begins writing and he begins to get things published in the Overland Monthly; and later in the Atlantic Monthly. Eventually the Atlantic Monthly accepted his long story of The Princess _____ for $120.00; which was a lot of money; which is like $10,000.00 today.

He does something which was unusual he’s always writing, he writes all the time; stories that first appear in a book called the “Sun and the Wolf”; these are stories about the gold rush in Alaska. Later he gets an advance for $125.00 to write his first novel. .

“Children of the Frost”; “The Cruise of the Dazzler”; “The Fish patrol”; his first novel is the “Daughter of the Snows”, he worked on this and began to make money with this stuff. The “Call of the Wild” is considered his greatest novel. He’s beginning in his home in California, and he wants to write a dog story; “Call of the Wild, a story about a dog. It started out as a short story and grew up into a novel. Now McMillan who is a big publishing house of the day; remember how Mark Twain was always bad with money and wanted to beat business men at their own game; it is true with London, McMillan gave London $2,000.00 to the whole rights to the book. London signed off and didn’t take any royalties. Huge mistake… McMillan published the book in over 2 million copies in English alone. London takes the money and buys a little ‘sleuth’ boat and disappears weeks at a time and wrote the “Sea Wolf”. He writes a number of stories; The Iron Heel.

He was never less than $25000.00 in debt. He built this house called the “Wolf House” that cost him over $100,000.00; the day before he moved in, the place burden down. During his last three years, he became more business man than artist. Here is what his biographer said… “He was gypped, hoodwinked, overcharged, and out bargained where ever he went. At the illusion of physical capability would not die. Not unlike mark Twain he along the same lines, He was tempted to beat business men at their own game, to make himself independent of the.

He unfortunately had problems with his weight. Hew would take certain things that would help him lose all the weight and it would affect his health. They believed he may have had this premeditative suicide, but most people didn’t think so; he had this “Urainea” which was painful. He was taking _____ and ____ and he overdosed on it.

I want you to think about this, the man died at 40 years old; and at 40 years old, he had written 50 books. It is astonishing. Some were just okay; but I mean they were still good books.


THE LAW OF LIFE

You have old Koskoosh he’s restricted to two things, his ears and how he hears, and his memory.

It makes sense from the point of view of the tribe; they don’t have a nursing home; they live off the land; the hunt; they can take care of somebody for so long its time, he has to go.

If you look at this you are going to see a little bit of social Darwinism in this, obviously, a little bit of London’s thinking; two things at the same time; he’s not really that happy that old Koskoosh is going to die. Koskoosh is not really that happy about it either. Now he can hear, and he lives in his memories. His life has going for it two things, his hearing and his memories. This is what we are going back and forth on.

“…his hearing was still acute, and the slightest sound penetrated to the glimmering intelligence which yet abode behind the withered forehead, but which no longer gazed forth upon the things of the world.”

Throughout the story you are going to have him hearing things. He will wonder off in his mind. Old Koskoosh says, “Ah! That was Sit-cum-to-ha”