Ultimate Creation And Destruction In Jim Crace's The Gift Of Stones

Ultimate Creation and Destruction
Jim Crace’s novel The Gift of Stones, is an intensely compelling novel that expands the world of imagination in an unchanging village of stone workers. The function of the novel is to give and tell stories to those who lack imagination of their own. Shown in Father’s world, as well as the Stoneys world, imagination can tear down both reality and dreams. Creating and destroying imagination and reality becomes the center of the Stoneys world, and is identified as a method of escaping the real world by use of the image of wind. In The Gift of Stones, Jim Crace uses the imagery of wind to explore the tension between imagination and reality. The distinction between imagination and reality is clearly specified

The wind is given human traits since the first chapter of the novel. Father sees the wind as a person- a person with a warning. Although he knows what the wind says, he continuously disobeys it when it warns him to “Go home to your house and fire. Go home” (3). At this point, the wind becomes a symbol for all that is uncertain and unknown in the novel; the wind warns him about the bowman that would shoot his arm with a poisonous arrow. This aspect of the wind stands out in The Gift of Stones as one of the many times that the characters do not head to the wind. Father has imagined himself as a horseman in one of his stories- a horseman who gets to be with Doe. Attempting to live out his fantasy in reality only angers the wind. Once again, it alerts Father that he should simply turn away and go back to his village of realism. He retains his dream, however, and is only awoken by Doe, herself, stating that they must “talk” (90). By staying in the heath, Father is exposed to the horsemen he imagines in his dreams and himself, Daughter, and Doe are all threatened. One of the many versions of Doe’s death leads her on the path walking to the marketplace, in spite of the wind blowing at her back telling her to “Go home” (147). The warnings of the wind are not only in reality, but also in Father’s imagination; it shows that the wind has manifested itself deep into father’s storytelling