The story chosen for the analysis is titled The Earth on Turtle’s Back, and it offers a different viewpoint on the creation of the world. According to the legend, which the story in question can be described as the creation of the Earth began as the wife of the chief of the sky complained about the dream that had been troubling her for quite a while. To comfort his spouse, the chief uprooted the tree, thus, revealing a hole in the sky. Curious and careless, the wife fell down through the hole and was about to drown when the creatures inhabiting the water saw her and decided to save her. The Turtle agreed to hold the earth mass so that the woman could survive; thus, the earth emerged amidst the sea (The Earth on turtle’s back, n. d.).
Brief and naïve, the story sends the reader back to the beginning of times. The surreal imagery, such as the tree growing in the clouds and the hole in the sky creates a unique and quite a surreal setting. Thus, the author allows for the development of the suspension of disbelief, allowing the audience’s imagination to work. Moreover, the specified approach creates more wiggle room for the story to develop.
The same cannot be said about the characters, unfortunately. Since the narration is aimed at telling a large story representing a large chunk of what seems to be an ancient religious philosophy, it needs to be either very broad and brief or very detailed and specific yet very long. The author clearly chooses the first option to keep the readers’ attention, yet this trick comes at the price of character development. Indeed, neither of the characters represented in the story can be defined as believable and three-dimensional. One could argue that is what seems to be ancient gods, neither the chief nor the wife need to be fleshed out and were only supposed to keep a basic resemblance to people. However, to make sure that the readers can relate to the characters, one should have added more uniqueness to them. The curiosity of the wife should have been explained and displayed in a more detailed manner. In addition, the holes in the lot leave readers with numerous questions, such as what the relationships between the chief and the wife were, what made the spouse see the dream about the tree, why the water creatures cared about the wife so much, etc. While the narration works fine as a piece of an ancient set of legends, it clearly needs to be explained better for people to want to learn more about the unique culture that brought this legend to the world.
In other words, the author’s choices can be viewed is understandable, yet their effect is clearly dubious. On the one hand, the key goal, which was to represent an ancient myth and create an environment that could be viewed as both simplistic and intricate was achieved. On the other hand, the characters that were represented in it lacked depth and development, as the author of the narration clearly had very little concern for expanding the myth beyond the existing clichés and introducing something new to it. Therefore, though interesting and engaging, the story under analysis cannot be deemed as complete. Leaving too many blank spots, it can be viewed as an exercise in creativity rather than a study of characters.
Reference List
The Earth on turtle’s back. (n. d.). Web.