Unlike less-researched books in this vein where the wilderness survivor just magically knows things or discovers things Sam is a nerdy bookworm, he looks things up ALL THE TIME His one-person survivalist fantasy is only made possible by generations of other people's research
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Replying to @arthur_affect @earnest_rs and
I mean, he openly "cheats" He's not really cut off from civilization at all, he's only a few miles from town, he comes back regularly to check out new books at the library whenever there's a new topic he needs to research
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Replying to @arthur_affect @earnest_rs and
It's a self imposed challenge, he's decided he can come back to town for information, just not to buy actual food or supplies, and that qualifies as "living off the land" (To be fair, he is succeeding at living without spending money, which he doesn't have, only a library card)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @earnest_rs and
Yeah. And he's having fun. He's occasionally making a statement by it, but mostly, he seems to want to have a place to himself away from his big, noisy family. Who show up at the end to join him, for some reason.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @arthur_affect and
Like, it's fundamentally a *personal* quest, not a social or political one. He's challenging himself, and asserting his own personal independence, for a little while, to see what it's like. And, fwiw, he gets lonely pretty fast!
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Replying to @mssilverstein @earnest_rs and
Yeah and midway through the story his solitude is disrupted by Bando, the old hippie dude who freely gifts him some more "domain knowledge" that becomes key to making it through the winter (baking pottery and making fruit preserves)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @earnest_rs and
Yeah, who starts calling him "Thoreau" in case it's unclear what the inspiration for all of this is.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @arthur_affect and
There's probably a pretty distinctive statement being made about gender, and it's not a good one. Sam primarily escapes from his mother and sisters; his father happily visits him. And then he replaces his female relatives with a female bird.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @arthur_affect and
That's a whole separate thing, but it does stand out.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @earnest_rs and
Well, yes and no The whole conflict is this thing about how his dad abandoned the failed family farm because "Gribleys don't belong to the land but to the sea" and is bitter about his kids keeping him from being a sailor
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It's his mom who shuts down his dad at the end "Well, I'm not a Gribley, I'm a Stuart, and the Stuarts have always loved the land" Implying he takes after his mom and never knew it
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein and
It's his mom who drives the decision to live there with him because she loves it as much as he did - "I felt her feet squeeze into the dirt and take root"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @earnest_rs and
OK, so maybe it's Freudian after all.
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