The message of Louis Erdrich’s Grief is simple to they who are looking for it. It begins with a message, a fact for any age of hardship; namely, sometimes you must take matters into your own hands in order to find your way home across the rugged and dangerous terrains of life. But the terrain mentioned in the poem is specifically an icy environment, which implies that the world is cold and harsh, and the only warmth it seems is that which is found inside the home, in the realm of familiarity. The rest of the poem progresses to explain how the icy, unforgiving world has been drifting over this realm of familiarity and warmth, slowly but surely eroding it away, and that there isn’t much of it left save the small sliver of light that is peeking through the door left ajar. The controlling metaphor in Grief can be discovered through several different mediums. Firstly, it can be analyzed through the…show more content… In Miller’s modern epic, William Loman is a failing salesman who is just trying to make ends meet and who also lives out the events of his past as if they were happening all over again. This is not unlike modern society in the sense that someone comes to or is born in America looking to make their fortune somehow, and yet they end up middle working-class, or even poor working-class, just trying to scrape out a living in the so-called “Land of Opportunity.” In Wet Camp, the failure of the American Dream is manifested in an actual blight complete with desolate Earth and trees bent and twisted out of shape. This can be analyzed into humanity doing anything and everything in the quest to be “on top of the world,” even if it means damaging the Earth beyond repair with things like oil spills, logging, and fishing more than can be replenished
