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Stephen Vincent Bent wrote the novel in 1937. The novel is fiction and takes place in and around New York in the future. The world as we know it has been completely destroyed, properly by one or several atom bombs. Many places have been into-cated and only the priests are allowed to go there. Only a few people have survived and they have gathered in tribes, who fight each other.
The main character in the novel is a boy, from the Hill people, called John. His father is a priest. They live in a very religious society where the priests are highly respected. John has been destined to be a priest like his father right from his berth. He is now about 14 years old and is ready to begin his vision quest to gain knowledge. Actually John s only goal in life is to get knowledge, he knows that knowledge is power.
Nine days after the journeys beginning he reaches a big river once known as The Hudson River. His whole life he has been forbidden to go near it, but even though he fears to cross it, his hunger for knowledge pushes him forward (His father: It is forbidden to cross the river. It is forbidden to go to the Place of the Gods). At the other side he discovers the ruins of New York, which he thinks is the place where the Gods live.
He drafts around the ruins and finds lots of remains from the human civilization. After a while a bunch of wild dogs forces him to seek hide in a big building. In the top of the building he falls in to a trance and has an out of the body experience (I could feel the spirits drawing my spirit out of my body as a fish is drawn on a line). His mind travels back in time and he sees the western lifestyle in New York before the nuclear war.
He thinks that it is the Gods he is looking at and thinks that they are great and mighty, but slowly he realizes that they were restless, greedy and made mistakes like every-one else. Then he sees how they were destroyed by the atom bomb and feels sorry for them (It was fire falling out of the sky. It was darkness over the broken city and I wept). After this he wakes up again and sees a dead man sitting in a chair and John thinks that the man was once a powerful God. Then he suddenly realizes that it is not a God or a demon, but a man.
The Gods were not Gods but just normal men like he. It was man who build the great civilization, not the Gods, and it was man who was responsible for their own fall. After getting such great knowledge he is no longer afraid and begins his journey home. He realizes that his father already knows about what happened, and the father tells John not to say anything to the people. If they tell it all right away people will go crazy because their whole life is based on their relief-ion, they might even accuse John and his father of blasphemy.
They have to tell it in small bits, and slowly rebuild the world again. If they do not do it like that people will rebuild our civilization too fast and forget all about the mistakes that the humans made and the whole story will repeat. The story is told from Johns point of view, which is called 1. person.
Stephen Vincent Bent uses that point of view to create a more exiting story with lots of emotions in it. If it hat been written in 3. person it would have been a less personal story. With a story written in 1. person you get to know what the characters are think-ing and what they are planning to do next. It is written with the vocabulary of a 14 -year-old boy, so it is easy to understand.
The theme in the story is the well known phrase: Pride goes before a fall The message in the novel is that we should slow down and think about where our lifestyle is taking us and what is important in our lives. If we dont do that, the story might soon not be fiction any longer. We have to focus on the true values in life such as love and respect for each other. The message could also be that great knowledge is not easy to have because knowledge is power and with power comes responsibility.
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Research essay sample on Point Of View Stephen Vincent
