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

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enlisted in the army and fought in Europe, where those Japanese-Americans who did join the military were sent, and he learns something important about himself, that he "had the stronger fighting spirit and a greater willingness to draw on his dark side in order to achieve final victory" (168). Kabuo views the flow of life differently than do the white citizens. As he sits in his cell suffering because he is accused of murder, he does not rail at his fate but accepts it: For kabuo Miyamoto was suffering in his cell from the fear of his imminent judgment. Perhaps it was now his fate to pay for the lives he had taken in anger. Such was the nature of cause and effect, such was the impermanence of all things (169). Prejudice is never far from the surface for most of these characters. Even the dedicated truth-teller, Ishmael, shows his prejudice when he speaks out angrily on shipboard after he is wounded and his arm is surgically removed (250-251). Ishmael never forgets the war not only because it make a mental impact on him but because he is always reminded of it by the missing arm. His name is significant, for Ishmael was the son of Abraham who was cast out of the family, along with his mother. In addition, the name was us

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