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Articles

Volume 23, Number 1 (1998)

A Geography of "Snow": Reading Notes

  • W. H. New
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1998-01-01

Abstract

In more than a superficial sense, the narrator of F.P Grove's "Snow", in Over Prairie Trails (1922), talks his way through space and time. Language is the landscape being traversed, and it is the telling, not just the teller, that cannot quite be believed. Grove shapes his narrative according to conventional formulae that draw the reader into accepting a sense of "documentary" transparency. Close reading of the text underscores the artifice and reconfirms that the narrative arc enacts a condition of perception rather than recording a set of empirical observations. The rhetorical trope relates adventure and land ownership with masculinity and social status, which engages readers in the same set of social assumptions and desires that Grove was obliquely expressing.