Empire Falls | The Knox River as a Metaphor
Pryor has a B.A. from University of Michigan and over twenty years experience in professional and creative writing with special interest in fiction. In this essay, she examines how the Knox River in Empire Falls is a metaphor with more than one possible meaning.
“Has it ever occurred to you that life is a river, dear boy?” Francine Whiting asks Miles Roby in Empire Falls. Apparently the idea of the river as metaphor has occurred to Richard Russo, because the Knox River comes to symbolize not just life in this novel, but God, death, and wealth.
Readers are first introduced to the waters of the Knox in the prologue, when C. B. Whiting discovers the river’s irritating tendency to deposit “all manner of other people’s s——” on his lawn. Whiting comes to the conclusion that God is doing this to punish him for...
[The entire page is 1355 words long]
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