In my travels this past summer, I had an opportunity to observe a new place with new people who held new views about life and the world.  Oregon, being a whole country away from my home here in Virginia, was plentiful in foreign ideas for me to learn and bring back home with me.  Considering I spent the entire summer there making friends and exploring the state, I can relate very well to the narrator in Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs. 

 

The narrator of these stories meets many characters in her time at Dunnet Landing making friends and listening to the stories and insight each has to offer.  During my trip this summer I met mostly people my age, but I noticed that throughout this book the narrator met only people older than her – people with more life experience than her and people with a lot from which to learn.  My observation lends itself to the idea that this story cycle is much about a person coming into her own.  As people search for themselves, their elders are an important part in shaping their views and personality.  For the narrator of this book, Mrs. Todd, Mrs. Blackett, William, and everyone else she meets serve as those dispensers of wisdom.  Through the stories they tell and the experiences she shares with them, the narrator learns a lot about the world and a lot about herself, even though she may not state it directly. Even though the people I met this summer were my own age, they had a similar effect on me – helping to shape my view of the world. 

 

A smaller point Jewett touched on in this book was that of family value in old age.  After the family reunion, Mrs. Blackett observes that the older a person gets, the more he or she values functions like the reunion they just attended.  She relates this phenomenon directly to the fact that young people see their friends and family on a regular basis while older adults do not.  I found this point interesting because of recent life situation.  As I have moved on to college and began spending my summers in far off states, I see my family less and less, and I feel a much stronger appreciation for the time I do spend with them as well as all they do for me.

 

While I did find The Country of the Pointed Firs to be a strange, and sometimes dry, story cycle, I was able to relate to it and its themes quite closely.  I think I will keep this one on my shelf for a while.