We contemplate our thoughts and writers’ ideas by reading the writings of history’s most fascinating minds. Reading is a practice in empathy or walking in someone else’s shoes for a moment, and it trains our imaginations to dream big. Character, setting, theme, and world perspective are essential considerations for all fiction writers. While these components determine whether a novel succeeds or fails, historical fiction has the added task of bringing the past to life. Richard Wagamese is regarded as a significant stylist in contemporary American literature. His style is full of emotions and is developed substantially through the use of phrases, and it is characterized by short plain structured sentences and colloquial language. Richard’s novel Medicine Walk illustrates his enthusiasm for life and the pursuit of adventure, as well as the themes of loss, connection to nature, and the importance of stories.
The literary theme in the novel Medicine Walk is the central idea and the underlying meaning Richard explores in the novel. The theme expresses the truth about human behavior and thought in a way that words cannot. It allows the readers to empathize with the characters and their hardships and become emotionally invested in the ending. The theme of a work of fiction is its perspective on life and how people act, but it is not provided directly to the reader; instead, it is designed to teach the reader. Medicine Walk is a literary fiction that tells the narrative of Franklin Starlight, an unusually mature 16-year-old who an elderly family friend raises after being abandoned by his drunken father. On the other hand, he enjoys the virtual peace of not dealing with his immediate relatives.
Medicine Walk themes are essential because they are the story’s reason and idea. Franklin’s journey toward acceptance and forgiveness of his drunk father, a journey that begins to heal the traumas of a parentless childhood, is symbolized by the title medicine walk. The theme of loss is just one of the many parts that make up the story, exemplified by the protagonist. The central characters in Medicine Walk are confronted with significant losses, to which they respond in a variety of ways. Eldon Starlight has suffered several losses, one of which is his estrangement from his mother, also his greatest friend.
Eldon’s love, Angie, dies in labor due to neglect, and she was killed in the Korean War. Eldon’s drinking impacts his wife since it contributed to her death. “She had a chance if she had made it here in time” (222), the doctor explains to Eldon as he approaches him as Eldon drinks to cope with his losses. Bunky, on the other hand, copes with the loss of Angie by deciding to raise her kid, Franklin, because Eldon is unqualified to care for him. “He said he would raise ya cuz he owed Angie,” Eldon says when he initially brings Frank to Bunky’s farm. I did not get it, so I asked him, and all he did was stare down at you for the longest time. Then he said she “brought him back to life.” Bunky copes with his loss by giving Frank life the same way that Angie had given him life.
On the other hand, Franklin must bear all of these losses, including his father’s death. “Sometimes when something gets taken away from you, it seems like there is a hole at your center where you can feel the wind blow through,” Bunky says as Frank returns home from burying his father. “I always went to where the wind blows,” (170) he tells Frank, to cope with his loss. The novel implies that genuine love often leads to significant losses through the relationship between love and sadness. As a result, people react to grief in different ways: accepting the loss, which leads to increased love for others, as in the case of the older man, or resisting it, which leads to increased anguish, as in the case of Eldon.
Franklin’s relationship to nature is another central theme in the story; due to Bunky’s upbringing, he is at ease in nature, which provides him with peace and a link to his ancestors. Both Eldon and Bunky have suffered traumatic losses, but while Eldon reacts by turning to alcohol, he respects his loss by rearing Franklin. For both Frank and the old guy, nature is a source of comfort and security. The countryside of the land in British Columbia is nearly a character in and of itself, where the land is the kid’s closest companion aside from the old guy. He defines the open land as a “genuine location where a person can learn to see properly—whether by pursuing an animal for hours through the forest or simply understanding the rhythms of it” since it is “free from artificial structures like a school rather than childhood hobbies” (290), he finds calm and contentment.
Regardless of Frank’s academic challenges, the older man teaches him to cherish what is true, as the terrain had become what the old man referred to as accurate by the time they got down the other side. Eldon has never been able to connect with nature in the same way for the majority of his life, and he suffers immensely as a result. Because he struggled to live as a child, Eldon does not have Frank’s attachment to nature. His family was very busy looking for jobs to hunt and live off the land, so he spent his time in the woods salvaging wood to sell. As a result, he spent his life bouncing around from place to place, never settling down.
Medicine Walk is based on several different memories and story threads. The central theme follows the little boy traveling into the wilderness with Eldon’s dying father. Along the way, Frank recalls experiences from his childhood bond with his father, and the father, more importantly, reveals memories from his own life. Eldon only has the father’s stories to pass on to the child before he dies, and Frank only has his mother’s stories, who died before he was born. When the child contemplates his father’s stories, he finds it challenging to piece together disparate memories. He tells the older man his father’s stories when he returns home following Eldon’s death, as he repeats the rhythms of their life together.
The Medicine Walk novel indicates that no one’s stories are their own and that people’s self-understanding is dependent on the stories others tell them. It is based on the kid’s process of hearing his father’s stories and hesitantly absorbing them into his life that Eldon spends his life avoiding levels because they remind him of his sad background. Storytelling is crucial to being a whole person. It not only has an emotional impact on him, but it also hinders him from opening up and chatting to others. Frank loved the stories his mother told him by candlelight as a boy, but the stories attracted a lover who abused her and drove Eldon out of his mother’s life for good. Eldon begins to believe that stories only bring suffering due to this, and he begins to hold his own stories inside and becomes quiet about them.
Though he opposes it, Angie begins to influence Eldon’s perspective on stories, and he takes a long time to act on it. She observes Eldon’s inner monologue and advises that hearing a narrative “takes you back to a story you have been carrying for a long time.” (280). Frank gives Bunky the entire narrative of Eldon’s life at the end of the book because Eldon is no longer alive to tell it himself. It indicates that Frank has absorbed Becka’s lesson—that people are, in the end, their stories—and has recognized the importance of tales in the healing process. Hearing Eldon’s experiences have given him a more profound sense of wholeness, and he now offers Bunky the same opportunity, bringing things complete circle.
In conclusion, Medicine Walk is a deliberate period set aside for delving deeply into a particular subject, entering a condition of profound listening, and connecting with nature as a powerful mirror. Through the channel of open time and spontaneous travel in a natural setting, Richard’s characters in Medicine Walk novel urge the readers to examine their relationship with nature and the characters’ life paths. The three main themes in Medicine Walk, love and loss, connection to nature, and the concept of memories and stories, all exhibit this
Works Cited
Wagamese, Richard. Medicine Walk: A Novel. Milkweed editions, 2015.
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