« Retracing our steps » : failles géologiques et défaillances familiales dans Goat Mountain de David Vann
This paper wishes to analyze the ways in which David Vann’s Goat Mountain allows for an exploration of the multi-layered faults and fault lines that a group of men grapples with after they come back to their camp for their annual hunting rituals. The novel tracks the events and thoughts of a preteen...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA)
2024-12-01
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| Series: | E-REA |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/erea/18562 |
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| Summary: | This paper wishes to analyze the ways in which David Vann’s Goat Mountain allows for an exploration of the multi-layered faults and fault lines that a group of men grapples with after they come back to their camp for their annual hunting rituals. The novel tracks the events and thoughts of a preteen who commits murder and whose adult narrative voice tries to make sense of what came apart at the seams in the Californian landscape and within his own family’s faulty legacy. The main character's inherited desire to pull the trigger bespeaks the inherent violence of the unstable topography and its polymorphous faults and scars. The ruptures that breach the surface of the Californian desert depict the instability that permeates the novel as metaphorical inscriptions of a geological and generational legacy gone wrong. These cracks crisscross a text which attempts to trace the underlying violence back to the origins of the failings while still coping with their haunting fallout. |
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| ISSN: | 1638-1718 |