“Life on the prairie held not; How could human beings continue to live
here…and those who were strong enough to make it this far were only
being enticed still farther to their destruction.”
~O.E. Rolvaag, taken from Giants In The Earth
This passage, taken from Rolvaag’s Giants In The Earth, occurs in the chapter “What the Waving Grass Revealed” after Per (a former fisherman from Norway who migrates to the Great Plains with his wife and children) symbolically removes the boundary stakes that Irish settlers had earlier placed in the barren land. This act of defiance signifies that Per has set his mind to making the land his home. His wife, Beret, however, intuitively understands that the land is uninhabitable and now comes face-to-face with the reality that they are about to be swallowed whole by the empty prairie. Sinking into a deep depression, she is terrified of their destiny but has no way of communicating it to her husband so that he will hear her. In her state of perpetual melancholy, she mournfully scans the flat horizon of the Great Plains for hours each day.
This passage is one of the most haunting of the entire book because it highlights the loneliness and isolation the early immigrants endured as they attempted to make their homes on the Great Plains. Above all else, this passage reveals to us that even the earliest settlers found life on the prairie daunting–and they wondered with every fiber of their being whether they possessed the fortitude to endure the experience.
Leave a note.