55 pages • 1 hour read
Ivan DoigThe Whistling Season
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
First-Person Narration
Doig uses Paul Milliron as a first-person narrator to provide a personal insight into the narrative and create a sense of intimacy. In the novel’s present day, 1957, Paul is the 61-year-old Superintendent of Public Instruction for Montana. Paul recounts events from his childhood, which take place during the 1909-10 school year when the narrator was a seventh grader. Periodically, Paul reminds his readers he is reminiscing by making comments about the two different eras, comparing and contrasting them. For example, in the opening paragraph of Chapter 14, the adult Paul reflects on what current governmental officers might learn from his one-room school experience: “If I could bodily pick up the appropriations chairman and deposit him somewhere enlightening, it would be at our schoolhouse those culminating weeks of 1909” (182).
The realities of the earlier narrative are touchstones of the current narrative. His brother Damon knew that Paul thrashed in his sleep; Paul’s wife makes the same observation. Paul’s father once farmed land that belonged to Aunt Eunice, and now an old classmate farms shares on the family acreage for him. As educators questioned the worthiness of the one-room school in his childhood, a new generation of leaders also question it five decades later. At two very different stages of his life, Paul encounters similar concerns and chronic challenges.
Literary Language
The narrator personifies many of his comparisons for emphasis, as when relating his father’s habit of reading with an “inquisitive finger” (2). In the novel’s opening paragraph, Paul portrays his family sitting around the table at the end of the day:
The oilcloth, tiny blue windmills on white squares, worn to colorless smears at our four places at the kitchen table. Our father's pungent coffee, so strong it was almost ambulatory […] The pesky wind, the one element we could count on at Marias Coulee, whistling into some weather-cracked cranny of this house as if invited in (1).
In addition to the abundant use of modifiers in this passage, Doig also uses alliteration and assonance: “windmills on white squares, worn,” and “weather-cracked cranny.” Thus, the author uses poetic devices to capture the essence of what he wants to convey.
Irony and Wordplay
Doig uses binary opposition and striking juxtapositions to draw the reader’s attention to elements in the narrative that are distinct from one another. For example, as the Milliron family awaits their new, unseen housekeeper, the boys speculate that she will be old, large, and unpleasant. They feel stunned when a lovely, young, petite woman greets them. The author intentionally contrasts these ironic elements. In Chapter 5, Oliver and Morrie discuss the difference between irrigated farming and dry land farming—something Morrie perceives as virtually impossible, yet a practice successfully followed by farmers for millennia. The comparison of extremes mirrors the author’s comparison between modern educational practices—building large schools and drawing students from greater distances—to the older practice of one-room schoolhouses.
Several of the characters in the novel engage in wordplay. To a lesser extent, characters like Damon and Oliver use creative expressions. Damon ironically nicknames Paul One Punch Milliron after he strikes Eddie Turley. When Oliver decides to accept Rose’s terms of employment, he asks Paul to help him: “We have to draft a telegram of surrender” (27). The Milliron boys creatively develop words of their own. When winter provides only a dusting of snow that mingles with the ubiquitous dirt, they refer to it as “snirt.” The most pervasive wordplay, however, occurs between Morrie and Paul, as the teacher pushes his student to grasp the potential of his vocabulary. One focus is on the word “appropriate,” with its two distinct meanings. Ultimately, Paul will incorporate this word into legislation, seeming to mean “proper,” when he will actually use it to mean “take control of.”
Related Titles
By Ivan Doig
