Student Question
How does James Still develop individual, family, and community perspectives in River of Earth?
Quick answer:
In River of Earth, Still develops these perspectives using the detailed description of an impoverished countryside as a background that facilitates the reader's understanding. Without knowledge of this milieu, one's insight into the characters' attitudes and behavior would be limited, perhaps more so than in other stories in which environment is not so much a factor as it is in River of Earth.
Most readers today would require a kind of leap of faith to have a degree of reflexive insight into many of the events depicted in James Still's novel.
The background Still describes in River of Earth is one of extreme poverty and deprivation. People are out of work when the mines have shut down. It's literally a matter of chance as to whether or not a family will have enough food. Yet Father insists that his relatives, Harl and Tibb, will eat with his own family, though Mother tells him that they're taking food out of the children's mouths.
At this point, Still is establishing the strength of familial bonding but also the male dominance within a family in this time and place. It would seem that in a rural, working-class setting, the patriarchal system is especially strong, perhaps to the point where a man would sacrifice his own children's...
Unlock This Answer Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
welfare for the sake of being able to declare that his word is law. The father's perspective is that of a man who, because of the economic misfortune shown so vividly, feels he has to assert control simply in order to preserve his self-respect. This is true even when doing so is detrimental to himself, his wife, and his kids.
The intensity of the Still family's poverty accounts for actions that would normally be considered desperate and irrational. The reader might question the perspective from which the mother, as in the story, lets a fire burn down her family's house, but this is exactly what happens—and in the context of the story, it is realistic. With the family forced to move into the smokehouse, the father's choices are necessarily limited in a way they hadn't been previously, when he was actually causing his own children to live in a state of even greater deprivation than would have been the case without the additional relatives at the dinner table.
The randomness of both nature and economic misfortune is a key to understanding the characters' perspectives. The Stills are impoverished, but the next summer their garden happens to be "thick with growing." It is a different situation from that of urban and middle-class life, in which there obviously isn't a direct dependence on family farming. When it's clear that Father again wants to allow people to sponge off of them, Mother silently begins to cry.
Her perspective is that of one who isn't permitted, by the standards of time and place, to make the decisions. It's the realistic detail Still provides the reader that makes the scenario credible, even for those of us who haven't experienced such situations in our own lives.
In River of Earth, how does James Still develop individual, family, and community perspectives?
We are introduced to the perspective of the individual by our protagonist, who often goes hungry. His frequent hunger is partly due to his father's charity. A great example of this is when the family were waiting for the beans they had planted to be ready to eat. As soon as they were ready, a group of starving people arrived, and our protagonist's father, Brack, allowed them to take every last bean. It seems that the needs of individuals in this family are often overlooked in favor of the needs of others, and this angers him.
We see the family's perspective through the eyes of our protagonist's mother, Alpha. When the mines closed and the food supply dried up, Alpha told Brack that he should kick his cousins out of the house to make sure that the food supply for the immediate family would last longer. Brack refused, showing that Brack's definition of family was broader than Alpha's and their son's.
From the community's perspective, Brack's home is known as a source of food. Owing to Brack's generosity, and his failure to preserve his meager food supply for his family, anyone who is hungry knows they are likely to be able to find a meal at Brack's home.