In the memoir Wild by Cheryl Strayed, she recounts her 1,100 mile hike along the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT). After losing her mother to lung cancer, her marriage ending in divorce because of her infidelity, her family struggling to stay connected, and her drug use, Strayed turned to the PCT in hopes of finding herself and becoming the woman her mother always hoped she would be. While visiting Minneapolis, she picks up the book, The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California. At first, she picks up the book and puts it down, but later returns buying the book and deciding to venture out. At this point in her life, she really had no one left and nothing to do. Her journey began in the Mojave Desert, crossing through California and Oregon, and ending
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Literature imitates not the world but rather the ‘total dream of humankind.’ Jung called mythology ‘the textbook of the archetypes.’ (qtd. in Walker 17).” “Archetypal critics find New Criticism too atomistic in ignoring intertextual elements and in approaching the text as if it existed in a vacuum. After all, we recognize story patterns and symbolic associations at least from other texts we have read, if not innately; we know how to form assumptions and expectations from encounters with black hats, springtime settings, evil stepmothers, and so forth. So surely meaning cannot exist solely on the page of a work, nor can that work be treated as an independent entity.” “Archetypal images and story patterns encourage readers (and viewers of films and advertisements) to participate ritualistically in basic beliefs, fears, and anxieties of their age. These archetypal features not only constitute the intelligibility of the text but also tap into a level of desires and anxieties of humankind.”
Cheryl Strayed and …show more content…
Both were young, Tom 24 and Doug 21. Strayed learned how their parents were surgeons and mayors and financial executives (Strayed, 109). Also how they had both attended a tony boarding school whose fame was so great even she knew the name. In addition, about their vacations, and how they were not experts of the PCT. “They hadn’t hiked all the way from Mexico, nor had they been planning the trip for a decade. And even better, the miles they’d traversed so far had left them nearly as shattered as they’d left me” (Strayed, 109). Still in Kennedy Meadows, Strayed had never felt more like one of the guys. “Being one of the guys meant I could not go on being the woman I’d first tasted way back when I was a child of eleven and I’d felt that prickly rush of power when grown men would turn their heads to look at me or whistle or say Hey pretty baby just loudly enough that I could hear” (Strayed, 111). In a sense, she was becoming more of an equal and looking at the situation very differently than she had once before. There was only one version of a person hiking the PCT. “On the PCT I had no choice but to inhabit it entirely, to show my grubby face to the whole wide world. Which, at least for now, consisted of only six
Literature imitates not the world but rather the ‘total dream of humankind.’ Jung called mythology ‘the textbook of the archetypes.’ (qtd. in Walker 17).” “Archetypal critics find New Criticism too atomistic in ignoring intertextual elements and in approaching the text as if it existed in a vacuum. After all, we recognize story patterns and symbolic associations at least from other texts we have read, if not innately; we know how to form assumptions and expectations from encounters with black hats, springtime settings, evil stepmothers, and so forth. So surely meaning cannot exist solely on the page of a work, nor can that work be treated as an independent entity.” “Archetypal images and story patterns encourage readers (and viewers of films and advertisements) to participate ritualistically in basic beliefs, fears, and anxieties of their age. These archetypal features not only constitute the intelligibility of the text but also tap into a level of desires and anxieties of humankind.”
Cheryl Strayed and …show more content…
Both were young, Tom 24 and Doug 21. Strayed learned how their parents were surgeons and mayors and financial executives (Strayed, 109). Also how they had both attended a tony boarding school whose fame was so great even she knew the name. In addition, about their vacations, and how they were not experts of the PCT. “They hadn’t hiked all the way from Mexico, nor had they been planning the trip for a decade. And even better, the miles they’d traversed so far had left them nearly as shattered as they’d left me” (Strayed, 109). Still in Kennedy Meadows, Strayed had never felt more like one of the guys. “Being one of the guys meant I could not go on being the woman I’d first tasted way back when I was a child of eleven and I’d felt that prickly rush of power when grown men would turn their heads to look at me or whistle or say Hey pretty baby just loudly enough that I could hear” (Strayed, 111). In a sense, she was becoming more of an equal and looking at the situation very differently than she had once before. There was only one version of a person hiking the PCT. “On the PCT I had no choice but to inhabit it entirely, to show my grubby face to the whole wide world. Which, at least for now, consisted of only six