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Snow Falling on Cedars

In the novel Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterman, events in a community on a small island in Puget Sound show the persistence of certain attitudes after World War II and how people who survived that conflict continue to live out the tensions and resentments of that war. Kabuo Miyamoto is a Japanese-American who spent the war in an internment camp, but once released, he still finds that his neighbors distrust him and are prejudiced against him because of his ancestry. Such prejudices become all the more heated in the context of a murder trial. World War II is always present for the characters in this novel, serving as suspected motive for the murder, as the crucible in which attitudes and human being were shaped, as a source of continuing discrimination, and as the major historical event remembered by the population.

In telling this story, the author delves into the lives and backgrounds of both the accused and the victim, two fishermen from the small town of San Piedro. The story is told in the third person, but the central consciousness through which events are filtered is that of the newspaperman Ishmael Chambers, a man who has himself been through the war and who seeks truth above all else. His war experiences have shaped his life, leaving him lonely and somewhat embittered. However, he is not so embittered that he would ever allow the truth to go by the wayside, though he is a deeply conflicted man as he tries to find the truth about Kabuo while he is also in love with Kabuo's wife, Hatsue.

The story is set in 1954, which would seem to be long enough after the war for people to forget some of their prejudices. However, this is not the case. Kabuo is no stranger to this community, for he grew up there and went to school with the man he is accused of killing. One reason this is suspected is because the victim, Carl Heine, is a member of the family that purchased Kabuo's land when he was sent to the internment c...

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Snow Falling on Cedars. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 13:11, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1690001.html