Symbolism In Three Day Road

The damage and trauma of the first world war had devastating impacts for countless individuals all across the world. It caused the destruction of entire cities and claimed the lives of millions. Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road focuses on the stories of three Cree-Canadians and their experiences during the great war both on the battlefield and the home front. In order to shed light on the often historically disregarded sacrifices and contributions of First Nations people during the first world war, Joseph Boyden uses symbolism to illustrate the impact of trauma from the First Nation’s perspective in his novel. The number three represents Xavier’s difficulty to reconcile the acts of war he commits and experiences, The lynx embodies Niska’s resilience in the face of …show more content…
Moreover, there are three primary symptoms involved in the diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder or PTSD (Anxiety and Depression Association of America). Joseph Boyden uses the correlation between these two concepts to create a symbol which represents Xavier’s struggle to reconcile the violence he both committed and experienced during the great war. From the beginning of the book, the idea of of taking a human life makes Xavier’s “stomach churn”(Boyden 88). In order to placate these uprising feelings of unease, Xavier often reminds himself that the dying soldiers who surround him will soon be “with the spirit who will take [them] on the three-day road”( Boyden 98). This exemplifies Boyden’s use of three as a symbol of his character’s conscious efforts to cope with the incredible trauma he suffers. On a subtler level, the majority events of the novel unfold primarily on Xavier and Niska’s “three-day paddle home” (Boyden 8). All of the reader’s knowledge of Xavier’s struggle with