Human Nature through Ron Hansen “Wickedness” In the winter of 1888, in a small town in Nebraska, a massive and unexpected storm paralyzed the community without warning. Humans, animals, agricultural life forms experienced massive destruction. Ron Hansen, in his short story called “Wickedness,” describes the brutality of the storm, and it’s affect on individual lives. Hansen uses human traits to illustrate the wickedness of the storm. Over one long dark night, the snow storm of 1888 dramatically affected many lives, by rapidly and without warning and cutting people away from safety. Nameless townspeople experienced the storm as a horrific weapon. One person was swept away and was lost until April, while another was frozen in place as she
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Hansen develops his story based on a real event, developing the storm as the central and most powerful characters . Hansen uses dark, compelling language and assigns character traits to develops the misery and intentional wickedness of the storm. As a result, the argument can be made that the main character of this story is not a human form; instead, it is a powerful act of nature given human attributes. For instance, when Hansen writes about the storm, he makes it an aggressive character. “ Hansen makes the reader feel this aggression through not only the meaning of the words but also by using sounds whether the words echo in the reader’s mind or while reading out loud. Every one of the storm’s verbs carries a hard consonant sound to make the reader feel like he got punched, “tortured… cracked… torn… socked… pounded… sucked… snapped… [and] jabbed”. Not one of theses words is soft and caressing. Also, Hansen has directed the sentence length just like a conductor who waves his baton to guide his orchestra.” This was said by Emily Swartz from A Wrier’s Metamorphisis: Closes reading of Ron Hansen’s …show more content…
He described the storm as having a “ hateful intent” resulting in a human fear and pain: “January night’s temperature was like wire-cutting pliers that snipped and then a kind of sleep and her feet seemed as dead as her shoes” (page 256). The fury of the storm was also seen as (page 255) “A forty-year-old wife sought out her husband in the open rage land near O’Neill and days later was found standing up in her muskrat coat and black bandanna, her scarf-wrapped hands tightly clenching the top strand of a rabbits wire that was keeping her upright, her blue eyes still open but cloudily bottled by a half inch of ice, her jaw unhinged as though she’d died yelling out a name”. Common, normal activities were shaped by the storm traps: person by just doing something normal like “A Chicago boy visiting his brother for the holidays was going to a neighbor’s farm to borrow a scoop shovel when the night train of blizzard raged in and overwhelmed him” “His body was found four days later and 27 miles from home”( page
Hansen develops his story based on a real event, developing the storm as the central and most powerful characters . Hansen uses dark, compelling language and assigns character traits to develops the misery and intentional wickedness of the storm. As a result, the argument can be made that the main character of this story is not a human form; instead, it is a powerful act of nature given human attributes. For instance, when Hansen writes about the storm, he makes it an aggressive character. “ Hansen makes the reader feel this aggression through not only the meaning of the words but also by using sounds whether the words echo in the reader’s mind or while reading out loud. Every one of the storm’s verbs carries a hard consonant sound to make the reader feel like he got punched, “tortured… cracked… torn… socked… pounded… sucked… snapped… [and] jabbed”. Not one of theses words is soft and caressing. Also, Hansen has directed the sentence length just like a conductor who waves his baton to guide his orchestra.” This was said by Emily Swartz from A Wrier’s Metamorphisis: Closes reading of Ron Hansen’s …show more content…
He described the storm as having a “ hateful intent” resulting in a human fear and pain: “January night’s temperature was like wire-cutting pliers that snipped and then a kind of sleep and her feet seemed as dead as her shoes” (page 256). The fury of the storm was also seen as (page 255) “A forty-year-old wife sought out her husband in the open rage land near O’Neill and days later was found standing up in her muskrat coat and black bandanna, her scarf-wrapped hands tightly clenching the top strand of a rabbits wire that was keeping her upright, her blue eyes still open but cloudily bottled by a half inch of ice, her jaw unhinged as though she’d died yelling out a name”. Common, normal activities were shaped by the storm traps: person by just doing something normal like “A Chicago boy visiting his brother for the holidays was going to a neighbor’s farm to borrow a scoop shovel when the night train of blizzard raged in and overwhelmed him” “His body was found four days later and 27 miles from home”( page