Robertson Davies' Fifth Business, Anne Proulx's The Shipping News, Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion, and Jack Hodgins' The Invention of the Wo

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Recommended: Purpose of myth and folktales

Myth and history are necessary in explaining the world, and can be depended upon for guidance with one as reliable as the other. The idea of place, with its inherent myth and history, is an important factor in one's identity because place shapes character and events. Robertson Davies' Fifth Business, E. Anne Proulx's The Shipping News, Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion, and Jack Hodgins' The Invention of the World use myth and lore to describe the obstacles which the protagonists and others must get over or confront in order to recover their perspective identities. Place anchors the novels in Canada: Fifth Business in Ontario, The Shipping News in Newfoundland, In the Skin of a Lion in Toronto, and The Invention of the World on Vancouver Island. Because they are different places, different stories develop; but since these places are in Canada, they share the Idea of North in which the dream world is as important as the real world. This paper will demonstrate this typically Canadian characteristic of myth coexisting with reality, showing that explanations of identity given by myth and the oral tradition are at least as powerful as documented history.

In order to understand how myth and history work to explain things and recover identity it is important to understand their similarities and differences. Myth and history are similar in that they both explain, instruct, give origin, and shape the world. Their differences lie in the use of the supernatural. Whereas myth deals with "supernatural beings, ancestors, or heroes," and explains "aspects of the natural world," history is "A chronological record of events, as of the development of a people....A formal written account of related natural phenomena" (College Dictionary 903, 644). Myth relies on faith for belief, while recorded history relies on documentation or proof. Though they differ in these ways, myth and history are both equally reliable sources of explanation and guidance. Whereas one event may be documented to have taken place and another event may not have such proof, both happenings offer the same end: what is to be learned from the story. Northrop Frye writes in "The Koine of Myth" that there are stories that "may be asserted to have really happened, but what is important about them is not that, but that they are stories which it is particularly urgent for the community to...

... middle of paper ...

...the real that will give a person wholeness.

Works Cited

The American Heritage College Dictionary. 3rd ed. 1993.

Beebe, Katharine. "Fusion." Mirage. Winter 1998: 16-20.

Davies, Robertson. Fifth Business. New York: Penguin, 1970.

Frye, Northrop. The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society. London: Methuen, 1970.

Frye, Northrop. Preface. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. By Northrop Frye. Toronto: House of Anansi, 1971. i-x.

Frye, Northrop. "The Koine of Myth: Myth as a Universally Intelligible Language." Northrop Frye Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, 1974-1988. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990. 3-17.

Hodgins, Jack. The Invention of the World. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977.

Jeffrey, David L. "Jack Hodgins." Dictionary of Literary Biography. University of Ottawa. 122- 130.

Jung, C. G. "The Shadow." Encountering Jung On Evil. Ed. Murray Stein. Princeton: Princeton University, 1995. 95-97.

Ondaatje, Michael. In the Skin of a Lion. New York: Vintage, 1987.

Proulx, E. Annie. The Shipping News. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

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