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Symbols In Three Day Road By Joseph Boyden

Decent Essays

World War I, commonly known as the Great War, played a crucial role in constructing Canada's international representation, as well as shaping the Canadian identity. However, the majority of the aboriginal soldiers who contributed significantly to the Great War came home unrecognized. In his novel Three Day Road, author Joseph Boyden employs a variety of symbols to recount the horrifying experiences of two aboriginal soldiers in the killing fields of Ypres and Somme. One of the major recurring symbols is the windigo in aboriginal culture, which is described as people who commit cannibalism and turn into beasts, and have an unfulfillable hunger for human flesh. The symbol of windigo functions as the representative for malicious subconsciousness, hypostatization of moral depravities related to war, and revelation of …show more content…

It is introduced in Niska’s first childhood story, in which Micah, a member of the tribe, is desecrated and eaten by his wife and baby under desperate situations. Micah’s wife describes the windigo as “a strange man-beast came out of the bush,” who “threatened to take and eat her child if the wife did not feed [the baby]”(Boyden 44). However, Micah’s wife is no longer reliable by that point because she too has turned windigo. Windigo represents the dark, venomous thoughts of Micah’s wife, which, by threatening her life and her child’s, persuades her to commit cannibalism. Micah’s wife struggles and attempts to fight against this thought by making a promise, that “if she and her baby survived the dark, she would feed the child well the next morning”(Boyden 41). This powerful presence eventually overcomes Micah’s wife as she drew her knife towards her husband. As a result of cannibalism, both Micah’s wife and her baby become windigo. This story about windigo lays the ground for plot development, and implicitly foreshadows the future events in the

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