Tales and Hemingway
In class I began thinking about this assignment, and the first story that came to mind was the first story I can remember hearing. It was an original tale told to me by my father about a village of smurfs living in an oak tree in the woods. The smurfs keep their blue color because every day they would line up in ranks and march out to the blueberry field where they would have their breakfast. The tale centers around one particularly rebellious smurf who doesn't want to eat blueberries, and instead goes and finds a strawberry patch. The strawberry turns him red, rather than blue, and upon his return to the oak tree is cast out by the elders for being red. Not wanting to compromise the rest of the village with his "sickness" the poor smurf is forced to sleep outside, braving the elements and hungry night predators. By the morning the rebellious smurf has learned his lesson and joins his people in the blueberry field happily.
As a kid I loved that story. Not because of the moral behind it, but because of the fun associated with being told it. Although that story will always have a particular place in my heart, now sitting back and analyzing the underlying concepts, I realize the story is a warning against thinking differently and going against the crowd. It reinforces why conformity is important as it's main moral! That makes me laugh, knowing who my father was. I didn't know Hemingway, but if he wrote stories that shared his perspective on life based off of what he had experienced, I would say that the smurf story was told thru my father's lens.
I know who my father was as well as anyone can know another person. He was raised in a tough environment, never had the luxury of being proud, and it was very likely that him deviating from what he was told to do would result in cataclysm. The Marine Corps only served to reinforce these values. So there you go; a person lives, they experience and those experiences change their perspective, change their values. Stories have power; life creates people, people create stories, stories influence generations.
As a kid I loved that story. Not because of the moral behind it, but because of the fun associated with being told it. Although that story will always have a particular place in my heart, now sitting back and analyzing the underlying concepts, I realize the story is a warning against thinking differently and going against the crowd. It reinforces why conformity is important as it's main moral! That makes me laugh, knowing who my father was. I didn't know Hemingway, but if he wrote stories that shared his perspective on life based off of what he had experienced, I would say that the smurf story was told thru my father's lens.
I know who my father was as well as anyone can know another person. He was raised in a tough environment, never had the luxury of being proud, and it was very likely that him deviating from what he was told to do would result in cataclysm. The Marine Corps only served to reinforce these values. So there you go; a person lives, they experience and those experiences change their perspective, change their values. Stories have power; life creates people, people create stories, stories influence generations.
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