Horses of the NightPerpetual Dreams
... obtainable. Yet even before Chris arrives in Manawaka to pursue his education, Vanessa is snapped back into reality. She doesn’t believe that humdrum people could live up north, where she imagines a magical world of snow and igloos. We discover this as she asks: ““Could plain people live up their?” I asked my mother, meaning people who were not Eskimos.” Chris’s life is a wake up call to Vanessa. He takes her and showers her with flamboyant ideas of doing anything and going anywhere in life. However, he also does not let on that he clings to a world of fantasy and unreal solutions, sleek race horses and monsters in the lake, easy to imagine yet hard to obtain. His life teaches Vanessa to dream large, but more importantly to keep a firm grip on reality. Vanessa assumes the world to be an immense mass which she could never, herself, dream of seeing. Her world is composed of the house she lives in in Manawaka, and nothing else. We even find Vanessa viewing the depression and drought as external and abstract, like she is hidden from the world. She admits to herself that she only really sees what is happening in her family, as if she is imprisoned in her own little world. Of course, she does not realize this until she is significantly older, when her true life’s lessons seem to set in. Vanessa watches as Chris’s life choices grow narrower and narrower until he sees absolutely no means of getting away. Slowly but surely, life’s big questions get to Chris, and in a final attempt to validate his life, he confides in Vanessa. Although Vanessa does not truly hear his words until she is thirteen, she learns a great deal from this experience. She discovers her hero, the one person she idolizes as a child, is unstable and imperfect. She learns that following your unobtainable, fantasy dreams is not realistic, and experiences first hand the spiral of defeat and unhappiness one can expect to encompass if not in check with reality. Chris is also a great inspiration to Vanessa. Before she meets Chris, we see Vanessa’s character as uninspired. However, we find that after her dealings with Chris, she attends college, something she might never have done without Chris as her motivation. Vanessa feels pity for Chris when she returns from college, maybe a tinge of guilt, having succeeded in her life only by learning from his. Pitying leads to wonder and hope that Chris has finally found somewhere to be happy, where he can be content and in-touch with his life. To help rid herself of this guilt, she places the symbolic...