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Re: Literary Symbolism
Posted By: Shelley, on host 12.16.212.150
Date: Friday, November 13, 1998, at 12:04:35
In Reply To: Literary Symbolism posted by John W. on Thursday, November 12, 1998, at 12:12:07:

>What if you guys had a BAM-type feature where you didn't super-compress novels, but rather expanded them? I'm not saying expand the whole novel, but rather expand one little point, and explain _____, that (seemingly insignificant) incident in the novel is really symbolic for_____(fill in the blanks).

Ok, I'm biting...

> For example, in the book "Ender's Game" (page 235), there is a scene where Ender Wiggin, the protagonist of the novella, comes back to earth and crushes a wasp with a bare finger. I could take this scene, and interpret "wasp" to mean "White Anglo-Saxon Protestant", and that Orson Scott Card was really trying to say that Brigham Young, the hero-figure of the Mormons, totally disproved the Protestant way of thinking (whatever that may be) with a single gesture.

Actually I think that if we're crushing the Protestant way of thinking then Ender would be more of a Joseph Smith type of character, since he's the one who did the original diverging, met God, told every other religion they were wrong... Geez! Don't you know you're prophets?!!! (o:

>[Of course, considering that Orson Scott Card wrote this story from the world-view of a Mormon, this is an entirely possible, if improbable, assumption to make.]

I would say that the most of OSC's books are ones that a normal Mormon (not the crazy ones) would hesitate to claim had much to do with their religion. However, the Memory of Earth series is a blatant Sci-Fi twisted version of the Book of Mormon, although there are large areas where he diverges completely from the Book of Mormon, the backbone of the story is from it.

Shel"big OSC fan, knowmyMormonhistoryinspiteofswearingnevertostepfootinchurchagain"ley