درآمدی بر ادبیات (PERRINES’s literature: structure, sound and sense fiction)
درآمدی بر ادبیات (PERRINES’s literature: structure, sound and sense fiction)
Hunters in the Snow
Summary and analysis
Wolff’s story exemplifies the complex art of characterization in its portrayal of three men, their shifting alliances, and their Darwinian power struggle in the snowy wilderness of Washington State. Initially the obese Tub appears as a figure of fun and a “butt” (as his name spelled backwards implies) of jokes: empowered in their truck while Tub stands helpless in the snow, his “friends” Kenny and Frank, picking up Tub an hour late for the hunting trip, harass him by almost running him down. There is a context here, of course, of lively young men who enjoy practical jokes, but immediately there is an undercurrent of real malice in the way Kenny and Frank treat Tub. The kidding is not good-natured but hurtful, as when Kenny immediately makes fun of Tub’s obesity to Frank: “He looks just like a beachball with a hat on, doesn’t he?”
Wolff’s use of detail lets us know that these are working-class men who live in a relatively lawless world: despite the bitter cold, they are using an unheated truck because “some juvenile delinquents” had vandalized it. James Hannah likewise observes that the story features a hostile environment and that we get little of the usual background information on the characters: “The three men appear isolated from the world. During the hunt, they move across a deserted landscape focusing the reader’s attention on their interactions. The title itself, like the title of a painting, promises a minimalist portrayal of three men in pursuit of game in a world of whiteness that is lifeless and inhospitable. . . . [The] lack of background is like the snowscape, an empty environment.” See Hannah’s full discussion in Tobias Wolff: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne, 1996) 7–9.
As the three men drive toward the hunting area, Wolff establishes the characters allied against Tub—especially Frank, the most villainous of the three. Not only is Frank, a married man with children, engaged in a sexual affair with a fifteen-year-old girl; he is also the type of man who fancies himself a philosopher, using phrases like “Tune in on that energy” and “Get centered.” (Later in the story, the more plain-spoken Kenny chastises Frank for his “hippie bullshit.”) Another telling detail is the pinky ring Frank wears “with a flat face and an ‘F’ in what looked like diamonds.” Any discussion of the ring should proceed carefully (a surreptitious glance at students’ pinkies can be helpful) but clearly Wolff means to suggest Frank’s bad taste and his egocentricity, for what kind of man wears a ring emblazoned with his own initial in fake diamonds? The occasional counterculture “wisdom” he spouts is belied by this showy materialism and by his ongoing insults to Tub. Admiring his own ring, Frank says casually to Tub, “You haven’t seen your own balls in ten years.” Frank has slightly more education than his two friends (his vocabulary is more complex, and he alludes to a Shakespeare play later in the story), but like The Misfit in O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” he uses his intelligence purely for self-serving purposes.
“Hunters in the Snow” maintains an omniscient point of view, reporting the three men’s actions from an objective stance and occasionally (but not obtrusively) commenting on them. For instance, the narrator emphasizes the lack of any real friendship among the three men with another small observation as they are getting past a barbed-wire fence: “Tub had trouble getting through the fences. Frank and Kenny could have helped him; they could have lifted up on the top wire and stepped on the bottom wire, but they didn’t. They stood and watched him.” Through its accretion of such observations and details, the story makes clear that each of the three men is wholly self-interested and that the balance of power among them could shift at any time, depending on circumstances.
Wolff continues to stress the suspension of ordinary laws governing human behavior. When, after hours of fruitless searching for deer, they find deer sign in a posted area, Frank insists they get permission to hunt there because “the people out here [don’t] mess around,” foreshadowing violent action. Wolff orchestrates the next scenes with great deftness and economy. Kenny goes alone into the farmhouse to ask permission, while Tub and Frank stay in the truck. With Kenny gone, Tub tries to enlist Frank’s sympathy and offers to hear about Frank’s relationship with the babysitter: this brief conversation signals the shift in allegiance (Tub and Frank vs. Kenny instead of Frank and Kenny vs. Tub) that will dominate the second half of the story.
Even after the men get permission, the hunting is unsuccessful. In a foul mood, Kenny vents his anger by shooting at a fencepost: “ ‘There,’ Kenny said. ‘It’s dead.’ ” Inspired, Kenny also shoots a tree and then, to Frank’s and Tub’s shock, an aging dog belonging to the farmer. Just as he’d enjoyed scaring Tub by almost hitting him with the truck in the opening scene, he now points his gun at Tub as if to shoot him next, but Tub surprises Kenny by shooting him first, in self-defense.
The wounded Kenny, undone by his own practical joke, becomes the odd man out for the rest of the story. Some of the best moments include the macabre comedy of Frank and Tub attempting to “care” for Kenny by covering him with a blanket that keeps blowing off, and making hapless attempts to get him to a hospital. Only when Frank and Tub learn from the farm couple that they’d asked Kenny to shoot the dog does the full impact of Kenny’s joke (which has backfired on him, literally) become clear.
Wolff’s orchestration is particularly subtle as he moves Frank out of the room, to call the hospital, when the farmer tells Tub why Kenny shot the dog. Presumably Tub keeps the information to himself because he needs Frank to testify that Kenny’s shooting at him was wholly unprovoked and his self-defensive shot justified. All these mechanics of the plot serve to underscore the essential self-centeredness of the three characters: each is struggling for dominance over the others with no real concern for the others’ fates. After the farmer’s wife gives Frank complicated written directions to the hospital, Wolff adds another small detail testifying to the essential lack of human empathy in this fictive world. It has grown dark outside, and the farmer says he has no flashlight to give them (surely not the truth), but that he will leave the porch light on; then he forgets, or declines, even to provide the porch light, and the three men struggle in darkness (“clashing by night,” one might say) to load Kenny into the truck. First there is a brief scuffle between Tub and Frank; Tub asserts his physical size, demanding that Frank stop making sarcastic remarks about his weight and wresting an apology from him. The shift in power is complete; Frank and Tub are allied in the relatively warm truck cab, while the wounded, bleeding, freezing Kenny lies in the back of the truck at the mercy of the elements and his “friends.”
While Tub seemed the most sympathetic character at the beginning, the reader may come to feel that Kenny is guilty, at most, of a callous, rascally disposition, while Frank and Tub are both self-centered literally to a murderous degree. Frank and Tub, a pedophile and a food addict, are accustomed to thinking only of their own appetites, so it isn’t surprising that they leave the wounded Kenny in the truck while they stop for coffee, using the rationalization that if they “freeze,” they’ll never get Kenny to the hospital.
The final third of the story drifts into tragicomedy as Kenny, delirious with cold and loss of blood, is instructed by the others to repeat the mantra “I am going to the hospital.” At this point, Tub realizes he left the written directions to the hospital back at the farmhouse, but by now Tub and Frank are forging, as they see it, a new bond by “confessing” to one another. Tub admits to his food addiction, Frank details his illegal affair with the young girl. In a classic scene of what psychologists call “enabling,” Frank insists that Tub sit down and eat several huge plates of pancakes, butter, and syrup—an act, of course, unconsciously designed to make Frank feel better about his own indulgences.
In the final paragraph, Tub and Frank have grown so close that Tub finally confesses that Kenny had been asked to shoot the farmer’s dog. They glance through the back window at Kenny, who is deliriously repeating “I’m going to the hospital,” a statement undercut with devastating effect by the narrator in the final two sentences: “But he was wrong. They had taken a different turn a long way back.”
The thematic bleakness of this story—in which people form symbiotic alliances purely to further their own gains and in which there is virtually no charity, love, or beauty—is mitigated to some degree by the humor of the dialogue and situation. While some readers may complain they “can’t care” about any of these three characters, this story (like some of Hemingway’s) seems to suggest that human beings, especially when isolated in a natural setting, can shed their socially constructed humane traits and become as primitive and predatory as the most unevolved natural creatures. In an interview, Tobias Wolff reported that three short films of “Hunters in the Snow” have been made, but that PBS refused to show any of them because of this bleakness: “it’s such an ugly little story that they won’t show it,” Wolff remarked. (From Jay Woodruff, ed., A Piece of Work: Five Writers Discuss Their Revisions [Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1991]; qtd. in Hannah, 124.)
In keeping with the hunting theme, the men act according to a natural pecking order. The more physically fit Kenny plays a series of harsh practical jokes on Tub, who is seemingly the weakest member of their trio because of his excessive weight.
As an existential work, “Hunters in the Snow” immerses its characters in an indifferent universe in which the moral signposts have been obliterated, just like the signs on country roads during a winter storm. Such bonds as individuals are able to form under these conditions are necessarily tentative, and they sometimes try to fill this void by consciously adopting the tacit rules of the groups to which they want to belong. At the outset, the hunters have bought into the myth of a rugged individual independence in which rigid personal boundaries are enforced by bullying. Even seemingly close friends are kept at a distance by constant ribbing and a willingness to ridicule their predicaments or shortcomings. Any sign of affection between the men or even basic courtesy is perceived as weakness. The futility of this approach to life is demonstrated by Kenny's plight at the end of the story; his companions are as out of touch with his suffering as the distant stars over his head.
As an example of reductio ad absurdum, the story takes the typical banter and hard-edged joking that is sometimes part of the bonding experience among a certain class of men to its ridiculous conclusion. The special bonds of friendship developing between the two uninjured men are so unique and highly valued that they do not care that Kenny could die from their neglect. Apparently feeling that the bonding experience is more important than a human life, they do not want the moment to end.
The narrative is told realistically, with an emphasis on concrete sensory details. As a sign of the unconditional friendship growing between them, Frank is not disgusted by the syrup that drips from the gluttonous Tub's face like a goatee, nor does Tub criticize Frank for the domestic mess that he will create. Such unattractive details suggest that the author does not endorse the choices the characters are making.
The major plot elements of the story develop in accordance with a basic principle of Zen Buddhism as that religion is understood by the popular culture of America's Northwest. Boiled down to its essence, the tenet is embodied in the saying that whatever goes around comes around. Hence, because the three men go hunting only as a diversion, it can seem like cosmic justice when one of them is shot. Similarly, Kenny is the most adept at maintaining the emotional distance among his companions. When his life is endangered, however, they are so distant that they have neither empathy nor sympathy with his suffering. They react with less pity than they would have had Kenny been a legitimate game animal.
From a psychological standpoint, the story is realistic in showing how Frank is more receptive to male bonding as a consequence of the strain he is placing on his marriage. Because his affair has lessened his intimacy with his wife, he emotionally clings to Tub to fill the void. Although he argues that Roxanne is more alive than other people, he has essentially been reduced to functioning at an irresponsible early teen level. Both Frank and Tub are selfishly focused on their own gratification, and by the end of the story, Kenny is almost reduced to being only a symbol.