entry 1

Three day road tells the story of two James Bay Cree soldiers-Xavier and Elijah during WWI, it begins with Niska finding out that her nephew-Xavier is alive after the war and brings him back to their home,  as they travel back to the moose factory-their home, Niska recalls her and her family’s history, whereas Xavier relives the horror of the years he spent in the army. For the first few chapters, it basically talks about how Niska went to a town of wemistikoshiw ( white Canadian) , saw her nephew who looks so “skinny” like an “old man”, then she drives him home on a canoe (seems a little bit impossible to me cuz their home needs days of travelling). On the way, as Xavier takes morphine in, the rain reminds him of friend Elijah, who died during the war, and he recalls the night before he went to the trenches(where battles were fought), in the town the troops stayed,  he saw the terror of the war for the first time, he saw his “ first dead body in one of these places, not the body of a soldier but of a small boy, naked and bloated in the sun, a great chunk of his head gone”, at the same time, Niska grasps every opportunity to divert Elijah’s memory by telling him his past.

Although I’ve read only a few chapters, I’m still impressed by the language the author used. As Xavier, the narrator, is a native soldier who has poor English, the vocabularies he uses are often simple and straightforward. Although sometimes the language even seems a little bit awkward, but this style of story-telling has a direct and primitive strength, especially in describing the battle horrors. Apart from the language, the author also successfully created a cruel and ruthless war in a soldier’s point of view with a detailed and precise description of the battle, the trenches the soldiers and their emotions. I remember this scene in which Xavier says “bodies melted and black…[gives off] …a smell sweet enough to make the stomach feel bad.”  We can also see that the author has down a lot of research for the story because of all the detailed description of the trenches lives. Actually, this story is so vivid that you sometimes forget that you’re reading a book, but watching the the war with your own eyes.

 I am actually a little bit confused at first, because the story keeps switching from the present to the past and switching back, it is not until the third chapter that I got a hold on what is happening. The beginning of the story is quite depressing, because the characters’ ends are revealed-Xavier loses a leg, becomes addicted to morphine, and is tortured by his memories about the war, on top of all these, Elijah-Xavier’s best and only friend dies in the end. Despite this depressing way of starting a story, it did stimulate my interest in further exploring the story.   As Xavier recalls his memory in the war, I find myself overwhelmed by the chaos of the battle, the main character saw a dead body for the first time and after a few pages, his first battle began. So after around 7 minutes I am already dragged into the trenches full of the smell of sweat, blood and mud, surrounded by the sound of the explosion of shells and rifles. The most amazing thing about this story is, I’m not be able to tore my eyes away from the book, it is like reading a person’s secret diary. I usually prefer stories with a happy ending, but I’m too attached to the characters that I don’t want to stop reading it.