Snow Falling on Cedars

by David Guterson

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A Tale of Two Ishmaels

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In many ways, Ishmael Chambers, the World War II veteran and small-town reporter in David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars is similar to his literary namesake in Herman Melville's classic Moby Dick. In fact, the two characters have enough in common to warrant a comparison in an effort to understand Ishmael Chambers better. Fundamentally, however, there are significant differences in the two characters' ways of understanding the world. If Ishmael Chambers had been more like Ishmael at this deeper level, he could have saved himself years of anger, resentment, and cynicism. It is likely that he would have married, had a family, and enjoyed the years he wasted on bitterness.

First, it is important to establish that there are enough substantial similarities between the two characters to justify a meaningful comparison. The first signal to the reader is the name itself. Ishmael is an unusual name, and most American readers immediately think of what is perhaps the most famous opening sentence in American literature: "Call me Ishmael." Briefly, the character of Ishmael in Moby Dick is a man who heads for the seas in search of adventure. Along the way, he befriends a cannibal, meets the crazed Captain Ahab (whose sole purpose in life is to kill the whale that took his leg), and survives a disastrous boat wreck. Moby Dick is such a cornerstone of American literature and the narrator's name is so memorable, Guterson (an English teacher) was certainly aware that readers would make a connection. Guterson's inclusion of a passage referring to Moby Dick's Ishmael further assures the reader that the allusion is intentional. Melville's use of the name is a biblical allusion. The name means "God hears," which refers to both characters' eventual triumphs over seemingly insurmountable odds. Ishmael was the only survivor of Captain Ahab's ship that was lost at sea during Ahab's final pursuit of the whale. Ishmael Chambers fought in the South Pacific during World War II, seeing the rest of his group killed. Although he survived, he came close enough to death that he lost his left arm.

Beyond sharing a name and the meaning associated with it, these two characters have other similarities. They are both participants in a passionate pursuit that is not their own. Ishmael finds himself aboard Captain Ahab's ship, and Ahab is single-minded in his pursuit of the whale. Ishmael Chambers fights in World War II, a conflict so passionately pursued by world leaders that it ended with unparalleled atomic devastation. In both cases, the stakes are life and death. They are both then reporters (Ishmael Chambers being formally occupied as one), only witnesses to the events around them.

Both men are essentially alone in the world. Ishmael Chambers has no wife, no co-workers, and no close friends. He is able to talk to his mother, but is guarded even with her. Ishmael is unencumbered enough to set off for adventure, and his only friend is made on the trip—the cannibal Queequeg. While Ishmael and Queequeg are friends, they are too dissimilar to bond at a deep level, and they do not have a history together. Just as Ishmael comes to see the very frightening and strange Queequeg as not so different that they cannot be friends, Ishmael Chambers sees Hatsue as more like him than unlike him. That she is Japanese and he is American is of little consequence to him because he prefers to focus on the person behind the ethnicity.

For all of these similarities, however, they differ dramatically in the ways in which they see the world and themselves in it. Ishmael seeks...

(This entire section contains 1541 words.)

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adventure, which indicates his impulse to be part of the world and to experience what the world has to offer him. He expects to venture into the unknown and be changed by it. In Moby Dick, he explains that he sees himself as an eagle that dives down, grasps what is needed, and returns to the sky. He sees himself as part of the pattern of the world and, therefore, as someone who is connected to the universe. Ishmael Chambers, on the other hand, would have been content never to have left the island of San Piedro. His plans after graduation are not to enlist for service, and the only reason he considers leaving San Piedro is to take Hatsue with him to a place where they can be together. The things that matter to him are in the small community of San Piedro. His adventure (the war) is a decision made for him and forced upon him, not an effort on his part to find adventure. When he returns, his bitterness is heightened by the changes that have taken place in his absence. Hatsue has married and had children, and he feels that everyone stares at him because of his rolled-up sleeve where his left arm once was. Although he never says so, it is clear that he would have been happier if he could have returned to a San Piedro in which nothing had changed since he left it.

Another fundamental difference between the two characters is that Ishmael is open to what the world offers, but Ishmael Chambers keeps himself closed off from the world. Ishmael is willing to see the world in new ways and to learn how other people and cultures think about life. Ishmael Chambers, on the other hand, is unable even to understand the deep cultural divide that keeps Hatsue distant from him. He imagines that the force of their love alone is sufficient to keep them together because he does not open himself up to learning about the culture of the woman he loves. When he goes to war, he is already bitter and cynical, so he avoids learning anything from his experiences or the other men.

Comparing Ishmael and Ishmael Chambers is important because it shows the reader how Ishmael Chambers' life could have been different. If he had been more like Ishmael, he would have seen himself not as a victim of the world but as a part of it. He would have understood that there are highs and lows in life, and that it was sometimes up to him to determine which direction he would take. Rather than stewing in cynicism and hate, he would have had the opportunity to see himself as a man with the power to climb back up to the sky, like the eagle. Instead, his perspective made him feel trapped and powerless. And if he had shared Ishmael's quality of being open to the world, he would have taken the initiative to understand Hatsue's situation better. While it is unlikely that this would have enabled them to stay together, it would have shown him why they were fated to part. His heart would have been broken, but the break may have been mutual and an act of love for each other's best interests. Instead, he perceived the break-up as an act of violence committed against him by Hatsue, and he could not forgive her. Because he felt wronged by it, he was paralyzed by it. The hate that Ishmael Chambers felt after the war, both because of the break-up and because of the loss of his arm, incapacitated him for almost ten years. He wasted a decade of his youth in resentment rather than enjoying being back home from the war and pursuing a life for himself.

The irony of Ishmael Chambers' unnecessarily wasted years is that he was given an opportunity to change his course when he returned from the war. After the war, he attended a university, where he began taking literature classes. He took a course in American literature and read Moby Dick. He was even struck by the fact that he and the narrator shared the same name. The reader is told in chapter four:

The next fall Ishmael took up American literature. Melville, Hawthorne, Twain. He was prepared, in his cynicism, to find Moby Dick unreadable—five hundred pages about chasing a whale?—but, as it turned out, it was entertaining. He read the whole thing in ten sittings in his booth at Day's and began pondering the whale's nature at an early juncture. The narrator, he found upon reading the first sentence, bore his own name—Ishmael. Ishmael was all right, but Ahab he could not respect and this ultimately undermined the book for him.

Apparently, Ishmael Chambers could not be taught a better way by his literary namesake, but had to learn his lessons by taking a painful and wasteful road for ten years. He met Ishmael in the pages of Moby Dick, and he liked him, but he was too distracted by what he found distasteful to see that an invaluable lesson lurked in the pages. The reader can perhaps find comfort in knowing that Ishmael Chambers did eventually find a better way to live by making peace with his past and taking responsibility for his future. Very often, this is the purpose of great literature, and if Ishmael Chambers missed it in reading Moby Dick, maybe modern readers will not miss it by reading Snow Falling on Cedars.

Source: Jennifer Bussey, Critical Essay on Snow Falling on Cedars, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

Interview and Essay about David Guterson and Snow Falling on Cedars

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David Guterson peers out at Miami's lapis Biscayne Bay as though straining to see something else—an island off Washington's dark Puget Sound, his home and the place of his haunting novel, Snow Falling on Cedars. "I'm not an urban person," he confesses in a crowded outdoor restaurant. "And I've been in cities endlessly for the past five or six weeks on this book tour. Cities produce in me melancholy or a tension I don't need."

Guterson, 39, received the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award for Snow Falling on Cedars. "It is such an incredible honor," he says, but what coaxes forth his first smile is the thought of returning home to his wife and four children. "What sustains me is to be with my family and to write."

Amid laughing people in tropical colors, the author wears an olive jacket. It brings out his pale green eyes which still search the water. This quiet passion extant in Guterson shines through in Cedars. Set in 1954 on Washington's remote San Piedro Island, the novel begins with the mysterious death of a local fisherman. It rouses the community's postwar distrust of their Japanese-American neighbors, and the island's Kabuo Miyamoto is accused of the fisherman's murder. The incident also awakens feelings within Ishmael Chambers, the town's newspaperman who has long loved Kabuo's wife, Hatsue. What results is a taut, many-angled story, both rich and satisfying.

Guterson looks to Anton Chekhov and Jane Austen as models of style and structure, and though he has set his story in the past, it is not old fashioned. "My book is traditional. It runs counter to the post-modern spirit. A lot of writers are concerned with life in the '90s," he says, "I'm not. Post-modernism is dead because it didn't address human needs. The conventional story endures because it does. I'm interested in themes that endure from generation to generation. Fiction is socially meaningful. Every culture is sustained by certain central myths. At its heart, fiction's role is to see these roles and myths are sustained."

The author has also written the nonfiction book Family Matters: Why Home-Schooling Makes Sense and the short story collection The Country Ahead of Us, The Country Behind, being released in paper this spring. Guterson wrote the stories before his novel, and now when he looks at them, he feels "removed from them to the degree I feel removed from who I was in my twenties when I wrote them. The stories reflect my concerns at that time. Snow Falling on Cedars is the work of someone in his thirties."

It's true. Whereas Guterson's stories possess an emotional edge, his novel has a certain maturity, sweeping the reader away with its lush physical description. "The tide and the wind were pushing in hard now, and the current funneled through the mouth of the harbor; the green boughs and branches of the fallen trees lay scattered across the clean snow. It occurred to Ishmael for the first time in his life that such destruction could be beautiful."

Guterson's gift of evoking a sense of place comes from his love of it. The islands off Puget Sound bear an almost mythic weight for him. "Hemingway said the only way to write about a place is to leave it. There's a certain nostalgia and romance in a place you left. But I don't need to leave to write about it. I don't think anyone but a native could have written this book."

One could argue, then, that with its graceful, restrained images of Japanese-American life, no one but a Nissei could have written it. A former teacher, Guterson conducted extensive research and interviews with the area's Japanese-Americans and so writes with authority about the Miyamotos and the other Japanese-Americans who were herded into internment camps. "It was made real to me. It's part of the history of where I live."

But Snow Falling on Cedars goes beyond ethnicity. Guterson explores humanity, penetrating the core of the human heart. "My work comes from in-ner disturbances, from seeing injustices and accidents and how they affect people's lives in a tragic way."

Guterson agrees one can make almost anything political, including his book, but he hopes it transcends both politics and history. With its evocatively Japanese title and its elegant, restrained prose, Snow Falling on Cedars reveals Guterson's affinity for Asian philosophy. "The sense that this world is an illusion, that desire is the root of suffering, the awareness of cause and effect—I have a great respect for all that," he says.

He endows his character Hatsue with this sense of tranquillity. "Hatsue explained her emotional reserve. . . didn't mean her heart was shallow. Her silence, she said, would express something if he would learn to listen to it." The same might be said for the author himself. "I think of myself as a really happy person," says Guterson, allowing himself his second fleeting smile of the afternoon. "What some people interpret as brooding melancholy is serenity. I don't feel required to grasp all the time."

What he does feel, what he works toward, is a sort of stillness, the stillness he creates for Hatsue, the stillness he needs to write. Guterson would rise at five a.m. to work on his novel, facing the blank page when it was still dark and the day's intrusions were distant.

While he has enjoyed writing nonfiction and short stories, Guterson is at work on another novel—the medium he feels best suited to in terms of temperament. He will still rise at five o'clock, but otherwise wants this new book to be nothing like his last one. "It must succeed in its own terms," he insists in the fading glow of afternoon. "It has to be just as powerful, though. It must have an impact on people."

It should resonate for readers the way the landscape of his home resonates for the author. "I grew up in Seattle, but I always knew I wanted to leave," says Guterson. "The greenness of the world, the play of light and living things, stretching endlessly and regenerating season after season—to have that in daily life is so much more satisfying than buildings and people."

Source: Ellen Kanner, "A Wonderful Irony: The Quietest of Books Makes the Splashiest Debut," in http://www.bookpage.com/9601bp/fiction/snowfallingoncedars.html">http://www.bookpage.com/
9601bp/fiction/snowfallingoncedars.html
, January 25, 2001.

Problems in Snow Falling on Cedars

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David Guterson's well-written first novel is at various moments a courtroom drama, an interracial love story and a war chronicle. Guterson melds these components into a novel that explores how individuals and communities abuse, retreat from or use their histories as motivating forces.

Set in 1954 on the fictional island of San Piedro near the San Juan Islands in Washington, Snow Falling on Cedars focuses on the trial of Kabuo Miyomoto, a Nisei (second-generation Japanese American) charged with the murder of a fellow fisherman and childhood friend, Carl Heine.

The novel unfolds to reveal complex relationships among the book's main characters: Kabuo; his wife, Hatsue; Carl Heine; and Ishmael Chambers, the local newspaper owner who is covering the trial. Before the war, Miyomoto's father purchased land from Heine's father, and young Kabuo and Carl were friends. Hatsue and Ishmael were also childhood friends and adolescent sweethearts. The war, however, forever alters these relationships.

Hatsue and Kabuo are interned in Manzanar, where they fall in love and marry. Heine and Chambers see battle in the Pacific, and Kabuo joins the heroic 442nd all-Japanese American combat team to fight in Europe.

The characters return to San Piedro after the war and try to resume their lives. Kabuo discovers, however, that during the war, Heine's mother, motivated in part by racial prejudice, sold the Miyomotos' land to another farmer. Haunted by this injustice, Kabuo seeks to regain his family's land, creating a strain between him and Carl.

Chambers finds it difficult to readjust to life in San Piedro, in part due to the loss of an arm in the war. He takes over his father's newspaper but finds little meaning in his work. His reintegration is compounded by his lingering love for Hatsue.

The novel is well-researched and, for the most part, emotionally realistic. Guterson has a good eye for telling details and writes vividly about the verdant landscape of San Piedro, the profound distress of combat and the solitariness of fishermen at work.

But because the novel mixes genres, it moves at an uneven pace. Not surprisingly, the courtroom scenes move briskly and suspensefully. Other scenes, especially those focusing on Chambers' existential search for meaning, are more ponderous.

Most of the book is written from the various perspectives of the characters, a tricky and difficult narrative technique that Guterson generally employs with success. But in places it means uneven character development, with some characters more convincingly drawn than others.

The novel's main flaw is the underdevelopment of Kabuo, ostensibly the story's main character. Guterson balances between exploding ethnic stereotypes and reinforcing them.

Kabuo is portrayed as stoic, strong and angry. Although he reveals emotional vulnerability in brief moments, his character could have benefited from more shading.

There are minor points in the novel that seem slightly inconsistent with Japanese American history. It seems unlikely, for example, that so many Issei (first-generation Japanese immigrants) would speak English as fluently as they do in the novel. The disintegration of family life in the Manzanar internment camp occurs a bit too quickly. Important distinctions between the Nisei-dominated Japanese American Citizens League and Issei organizations are not made.

Overall, though, this is an intriguing novel that explores the burdens of history and how random circumstances combined with ethnic stereotypes contribute to resulting troubles and tragedies.

Source: Stan Yogi, "A Friendship Shattered by War," in San Francisco Chronicle, January 1, 1995, p. 2.

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