The second is when he is beginning to see that life is much more complicated and depressing than he had expected it to be. The first is when Douglas is just beginning his summer and has had a beautiful revelation that he is alive. There are three scenes, one at the beginning, one in the middle, and one at the end. A bottle of the wine can then be accessed months later - in the cold of winter, Douglas explains - in order to draw upon the warmth and richness of the summer memory.īradbury also uses the making of dandelion wine as a way to structure his novel. The bottling of dandelion wine is, first, a metaphor for the bottling and preservation of memory. What role does dandelion wine play in the text? Examples of connections include: 1) coming-of-age and initiation stories (Twain, Franklin) 2) spiritual discoveries, the sense of wonder, joy in the sensory experiencing of life, the miraculous and marvelous in the quotidian (Whitman) 3) symmetry and balance in structure (dandelion wine bottling mirrors Hawthorne's three scaffold scenes in The Scarlet Letter) 4) the will to live and the will to die (Queequeg in Moby Dick) 5) Melvillian motifs of light and dark and good and evil 6) nostalgia, Americana, growing up (Twain) and 7) insidious darkness and danger (Poe). How does this work connect to American literature as a whole?Ĭritic Marvin Mengeling provides an illuminating look at where this novel fits into the arc of American literature.
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