Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives. - Chuck Palahniuk.
Joseph Boyden’s novel Three Day Road, tells a tale of the indigenous peoples of Canada and their interaction between the settlers. The main characters, Xavier, Elijah and Niska struggle to cope and survive in a world that is changing faster than ever before. The concept of the windigo is very prevalent throughout the novel as they are shown to live amongst the characters. Xavier, Elijah and Niska all show varying degrees of windigo tendencies at certain points in the story. The windigo are associated with cannibalism, murder, greed and the taboos in Algonquian culture.
Xavier is the primary protagonist in the novel who is a Canadian soldier in World War One, the reader follows his adventures in Europe through dreams of morphine. The insatiable hunger for morphine begins to self-cannibalize the body. The body rejects food and water and trembles when waste leaves the body. The act of greed is known to be a taboo in the Algonquin culture. The greed that morphine induces beckons the windigo spirit. At a point in the novel, Xavier reminisces on his time in Ontario wilderness and comes to the conclusion that in war, no party is safe from anguish and the madmen rise from the ashes. "No one is safe in …show more content…
Killing is second nature to him, he does not fear God or his punishment, he only sees the devil and is driven by a malevolent urge. Similarly the windigo spirit blinds the host and aninsatiable hunger sets inside the body of the man. The host acts as an instrument to the spirit, a device to fulfill its hunger. Like a parasite, the spirit makes a man wild and animalistic in behaviour. Elijah is the closest semblance to the stories of the windigo and he shows the strongest signs of PTSD even though it appears as if he was immune to war but he is the first to crack under the
Joseph Boyden’s novel Three Day Road, tells a tale of the indigenous peoples of Canada and their interaction between the settlers. The main characters, Xavier, Elijah and Niska struggle to cope and survive in a world that is changing faster than ever before. The concept of the windigo is very prevalent throughout the novel as they are shown to live amongst the characters. Xavier, Elijah and Niska all show varying degrees of windigo tendencies at certain points in the story. The windigo are associated with cannibalism, murder, greed and the taboos in Algonquian culture.
Xavier is the primary protagonist in the novel who is a Canadian soldier in World War One, the reader follows his adventures in Europe through dreams of morphine. The insatiable hunger for morphine begins to self-cannibalize the body. The body rejects food and water and trembles when waste leaves the body. The act of greed is known to be a taboo in the Algonquin culture. The greed that morphine induces beckons the windigo spirit. At a point in the novel, Xavier reminisces on his time in Ontario wilderness and comes to the conclusion that in war, no party is safe from anguish and the madmen rise from the ashes. "No one is safe in …show more content…
Killing is second nature to him, he does not fear God or his punishment, he only sees the devil and is driven by a malevolent urge. Similarly the windigo spirit blinds the host and aninsatiable hunger sets inside the body of the man. The host acts as an instrument to the spirit, a device to fulfill its hunger. Like a parasite, the spirit makes a man wild and animalistic in behaviour. Elijah is the closest semblance to the stories of the windigo and he shows the strongest signs of PTSD even though it appears as if he was immune to war but he is the first to crack under the