Publication details
Mentalité de garnison et survivance dans Le poids de la neige de Christian Guay-Poliquin
| Title in English | Garrison Mentality and Survival in Christian Guay-Poliquin’s The Weight of Snow |
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Description | In his novel, The Weight of Snow, Christian Guay-Poliquin narrates a story of a lonesome man in a world hit by a mysterious blackout. After his homecoming in a village, hidden somewhere deep in the forests of Quebec, this nameless hero is exposed to extreme situations and hostilities of nature. There, a spatial dichotomy between the inside and the outside takes place. We observe the interior of a hut, inhabited by the narrator and his guardian, located above the village surrounded by the forest cutting its universe from the rest of the world, giving the narration its secluded atmosphere. Space of protection, source of wood and nutrition, but also of unknown dangers and threats, the forest and its barrier allows the narrator to construct a space of tension which is accentuated by the winter, season in which the story takes place. In order to study this dichotomy, we apply the concept of garrison mentality, introduced by Northrop Frye, and Margaret Atwood’s concept of survival. In our contribution, we analyse how these two notions, survival and garrison mentality, as defined by Atwood and Frye, which are linked to abandonment, isolation, separation, fear, and the feeling of threat, are present in this work in connection with its spatiality, especially that of the forest building a natural protective wall. |
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