Blog #4: "Roots" Extension Activity

Anna Hayes

English IV A

Mrs. Wilson

29 August 2014

Summer Reading Prompted Writing

            In Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, Walter Moody attempts to understand the connection of every member of the gathering at the Crown Hotel. This was a major theme throughout the course of the novel, which is an attempt to understand how events and people can relate to one another through the smallest of details. This passage demonstrates how twelve unaware people gathered because of their “association to the events of the 14^th of January,” (342).

            This passage was located at the end of a long explanation, given by Thomas Balfour, to Walter Moody, the speaker. Walter’s tone is very doubtful of the situation, because he believes that he is not being told the whole story, although he does explain the presence of every man. This is a turning point in the novel, as the recount of past events has finally come to an end. He referred to the group, however, as a “confoundedly peripheral gathering,” in which the word “peripheral” describes how he believes to be an outsider to the situation, as it every other man in the room (342). He notices that those who would have been able to shed more light onto the situation, Anna Wetherell, Francis Carver, and Alastair Lauderback. Without this, the reader cannot fully understand that the bulk of the information came to them second-hand.

            At the beginning of this passage, the room was very quiet, and every person did not dare to speak. Moody describes it as a “silence that, for a moment, seemed to still the breath of every man” (341). This figurative language relates to the book, as many question the presence of a ghost, and the silence could be a catalyst. The image in the readers head shows the room as dead silent, so Catton uses imagery to describe the background noise to break the silence in the room, with sounds such as “an accordion, distant showing, an infrequent whoop, hoof beats” (341). This shows how the world did not stop moving around them, an important thought when, not long after, it is discovered that Francis Carver’s ship known as the Godspeed, was wrecked along the shore. This boat has been at the center of the story from the beginning, which is one of the reasons that Moody was even at the meeting. Every man in the room was connected to the ship or to Francis Carver.

            Catton’s syntax describes the thought process of Walter Moody, by inserting his thoughts and comments while describing his actions. He describes the explanation he had heard the past night, for as “disjunctive and chaotic as it was, [it] had indeed accounted for the presence of every man in the room” (341). He proceeds to look around the room, and describe every man in the room, as well as their position. This combination of syntax and imagery shows Moody’s attempt to interpret the information, as well as to connect each man to one another, and their own fault in the current situation.