Three Day Road

Boyden’s Depiction of Justifiable Murder in Three Day Road Like most great war novels, Three Day Road is about death. However, Boyden’s incorporation of Cree spiritualism and views on morality, good, and evil treats death with a reverence that is atypical of that genre. Even still, deaths in Three Day Road can be divided into two categories - callous and personal deaths. Callous deaths are those such as the death of a young private by flamethrower or the sniping of a German machine gun operator from 100 yards away. Boyden gives personal deaths more attention, devoting paragraphs if not pages to their lead-up, execution, and aftermath. In stark contrast to Silko’s depiction of killing in Ceremony, Boyden shows killing as an unfortunate, but…

What makes us human in the darkest of times? Time after time people from all around the world go through tough times and for some it changes their morals and ideals. How do these events change people? Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden tells the story of two Cree boys that face the terrors of war. Similarly, Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is about two young men in China experiencing re-education in the time of the Cultural Revolution. These stories both convey a message that…

The Contrast Between Desire and Need The contrast between acting for personal gain and survival in Boyden’s Three Day Road and “The Wonder and Danger of Mighty Moose River” highlights the need for a physical balance in the environment. In Three Day Road, a contrast is displayed between hunting for personal profit and hunting to survive, which demonstrates the harmony that must be maintained in nature to keep the resources sustainable. While Elijah and Xavier are hunting through the winter to…

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…

As suggested by Joseph Boyden in Three Day Road, the battle against addiction helped guide the course of restoring honour and certainty with forgiveness (healing), memories, and friendship. In addition to how morphine helped set the plot into motion, morphine also put a negative spin on the characters and plot. It is important for an individual to find healthy ways to heal after being exposed to such tragedies. When an individual overcomes these past adversities they will come to a new point of…

Death, sex, and love. The three main plots found within most literature. Three Day Road encompasses all three of them into a underlying theme: addiction. The theme of addiction shows how no matter what one is addicted to it will end badly. From Elijah getting high off killing, the Frenchman thriving off of sex, and Niska’s obsession with the Frenchman; all addictions lead to catastrophe. Elijah is a main character who is developed throughout the novel. Elijah is a strong fighter and hunter,…

The life of a soldier in World War One was one filled with death, destruction, and atrocity. For many, the reality in which they existed proved too much for what one person could handle. A soldier often returned a different man, both physically and psychologically. In Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road”, the main characters Elijah and Xavier are subjected to this reality. In contrasting the different personalities of Elijah and Xavier, one can demonstrate how war is experienced by individuals in…

A good childhood is a fundamental aspect of a child's future; their happiness, health and how motivated they will be in life depends on how they were raised. A lack of proper nurturing may have dire effects. It is common for people to put up a front and act very confident, whilst truly having a very low self-esteem. People with a low self-esteem who have not been brought up correctly have a stronger possibility of being substance abusers. In Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road, Elijah Weesageechak…

Anybody can be trapped by addiction. Addiction is a habit of activity that targets and transforms people who have endured pain in their heart. There are a few factors that make some people more vulnerable to addiction than others. Moreover, Joseph Boyden depicts a certain character, Elijah, in the novel, Three Day Road, that is more vulnerable to addiction. Encountering bad experiences in one’s childhood, possessing a desire to fit in and a greed for power makes people more vulnerable to…

The Role of Societal and Gender Expectations: A Focus on Identity In Joseph Boyden’s novel Three Day Road, the controversial author presents an Aboriginal coming-of-age story with a new perspective on the Great War while in Christina Rossetti’s poem, “Goblin Market,” the sensuous poet creates a fantastical world for a children’s poem. Both works accentuate the doubt concerning one’s identity because of gender and racial binaries which contributes to social status. In Three Day Road, comrades -…