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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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein and
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 @mssilverstein and
And the sequel, On the Far Side of the Mountain, has his little sister Alice become even more of a mountain person than he is She moves out from the house to live in a tree nearby herself when she gets to be his age, and then she disappears
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The sequel is about adult Sam having to go hunt down Alice because she ran away a lot farther than he did, to the actual wilderness (the other side of the mountain)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @earnest_rs and
Yeah. The author was a woman, so she may have realized some of it and decided to reboot a little bit.
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