Lit Circle #5 Response

In this literature circle we began to unravel the last of the story. At the end of the book, all the loose ends came together and everything began to make sense. There was a significant analogy in this chapter: lock, stock and barrel. These represent the three girls, Leah is the barrel, Rachel the lock and Adah the quiet stock.All these parts when separate are useless and when put together are complete and make a whole. The assemblence of the parts creates a whole, however it is a violent and destructive whole,a gun. This could be seen as, once the girls are all together, they create something deadly and together they kill their Ruth May. Another analogy for the Price family arose in the last section of the book: the tree, the stump and the seedlings. The tree stands for Orleanna who hold everything together and is Ruth May's safe haven from the rest of the world. The stump is Nathan, rotting away into nothing and the seedlings are of course the girls, springing up from underneath the safe tree, growing taller as the stump rots further into the ground.
The Okapi appears once again in this chapter. Our class decided that it represented the spirit of the Congo who lived for one more year and then died, it was subjected to the same cycle of life as the spider and anything else; when one creature dies, another one lives. So, perhaps by the death of the Okapi it will allow another animal, another country to live for just one more year. This is an interesting topic, the Okapi was affected by one of the smallest of insects and was allowed to live an entire extra year and bread children. The idea that everything on earth is tied together and that every second we live we are affecting others tied into a speech we heard in chapel. Weather it be a child or an insect we are affecting everything around us.
Each girl including Orleanna found their own personal religion away from Christianity. Adah found science and the study of disease. She still believes in balance and uses her palindromes in her work. Rachel has not changed, she believes only in herself and her material goods. Leah is perhaps the most like her father, she is constantly over-compensating for a guilty past. Leah believes with all her heart in Anatole and Africa, she is a humanitarian and believes in suffering. Orleanna still has some christian blood in her, but mainly she turns to her garden for comfort. She started new with new seeds and can see beautiful things grow from her hands. This is how the four living Price's deal with their history and their very present pain.
The title of the last chapter is "the eyes in the trees". These eyes are Ruth May because she is the green mamba snake up in the branches looking down on everyone. She watches everything and yet no one can see her. Nathan, Orleanna and the three sisters all feel the eyes on them, creating guilt and furthering Nathan's need to save.
Ruth May was in the end set free with death, like Methuselah. Ruth May talks about how death is like living. There is a palindrome here that Adah had earlier pointed out. The palindrome of life and death. So, when Ruth May tells her mother to walk into the light, it is a double meaning. Light comes both from life as well as death, from birth and death alike. Lightness is also forgiveness. Ruth May, Methuselah, Nathan were all set free at death, they walked into the light and were given forgiveness.