Quote 2
When
they looked out into the whiteness of the world the wind flung it
sharply at their narrowed eyes and foreshortened their view of everything.
This passage, near the beginning of
Chapter 12, illustrates Guterson’s use of
the snowstorm as a motif in the novel. Relentless and impersonal,
the storm repeatedly batters the island, leaving the islanders at
its mercy. Guterson implies that the storm is like the universe:
cold and impersonal, the product of random chance that humans are
powerless to control. Relentlessly pummeling the courthouse, the
storm symbolically lashes at humanity’s frail attempts to sort out
right from wrong and guilt from innocence within the courtroom.
Those who go outside and face the storm directly lose their sense
of direction and vision and are thrust into a nearly primitive struggle
to survive. Everything else—such as abstract concepts like justice
and love—is obliterated. In “foreshorten[ing] their view of everything,”
the storm forces people to look into the “whiteness of the world.”
This last phrase is likely a reference to Herman Melville’s famous
chapter in Moby Dick—titled “The Whiteness of the
Whale”—in which the narrator equates the “all-consuming” whiteness
of the whale with chaos, disorder, and the powerlessness of the
individual to influence his or her fate.
