A Northern Light

General thoughts and reflections

I teach postmodernism during the spring trimester to my 11th grade English classes. We study this in accompaniment with The Things They Carried for the purpose of students being able to have a starting off point to understand the text better, and in order to give them specific qualities to look for and annotate for. After first learning much about postmodernism, and then teaching it, I find myself often surprised at how pervasive the elements of postmodernism are in our modern literary culture. One of the qualities of postmodernism I have students pay attention to is fragmented narrative. In my experience, students have often complained about the difficulties they have with comprehension when reading texts with a fragmented narrative structure. My heart goes out to those students; this has become a trendy or popular choice for many texts and authors to employ for little more reason than for the sake of being different, or being hip and modern. However, there are occasions (like in O’Brien’s novels, and in Donnely’s Northern Light) where this is different.

In Donnely’s text, the double narrative is crafted thoughtfully – I did not find it confusing or disorienting, like others (including the text I read for my choice novel). The double narrative is also carefully and purposefully written as a device that works toward the text’s larger whole, bringing our focus to the point of their merging, when Mattie finds resolve and shares the letters with others. Additionally, there is unity given to each chapter through the vocabulary words that Mattie studies – though the separate timelines are divisive to the plot’s structure, the vocab unites them by linking descriptions and content. I focus on this literary device only as an example that proves a larger whole – that Donnely’s text is very carefully and purposefully constructed. This was something that I was delighted with in the text, and I am finding more and more that adolescent literature is not exactly what I had imagined it would be as a genre.

My original conception of most adolescent texts was something far more similar to Sweet Valley High books, or titles where the main conflict centered on whether the cool boy/girl thought the main boy/girl was cute, and wanted to smooch later. I know much better now that while a multitude of those texts do exist, there is much deeper literature being written and marketed for young adults as well. What I found in Northern Light was a difficult coming of age story of a young woman complete with very complex themes of duty and responsibility to one’s self vs. family and community, and the disheartening realizations that come with learning of the disparity between appearances and truth in character.

After I finished with this text, I had to chew on the theme of responsibility to self and others for a bit. I struggled with the Awakening by Chopin the first time I read it, as I had difficulty with Edna’s all-or-nothing approach to answering this question. In Northern Lights, Mattie is very conscientious of both sides – she wants to pursue her dreams, though at the same time, she is very sympathetic to the needs of her father and others in her immediate community. The struggle is real, and the tug-of war she goes through is not simple or one-sided. I appreciated the complexity of this struggle, and think that the author gave it the involvedness that it deserves.

There is much to be enjoyed about in this text. On the other side of the coin however, by main criticism is that the text’s ending does not remain consistent to the larger whole. Mattie does not need to make a significant sacrifice in the end – she finds a way for every major need at the farm and with the neighbors to be met, and is even able to be the financial means for nearly everyone she cares about to be happy and secure. Were I reading only for plot, I would look at this happy ending as a relief that “everything worked out” at the end. However, since this text is as rich in theme as it is, I found myself reading below the surface – and I was a bit disappointed when it was not necessary for Mattie to make a choice between the two. The choice book I read had an almost too satisfying ending that was similar in this fashion as well.