This is a part of my project in studying the mechanics of creative writing.

1. Plot-driven Novels vs.
Character-driven
Novels II
June 21, 2014 at Tohoku University
M. “Bobby” Takahashi & Stephen A. Shucart
Akita Prefectural University

2. Plot-driven Novels
 The hero fights against the enemy that is
outside of him/her.
 Popular novels are often plot-driven,
but not all the time.

3. Character-driven Novels
 The hero fights against the enemy that is
inside of him/her.
 The enemy inside him/her is his/her
weaknesses.
 Serious literary novels are often
character-driven, but not all the time.

4. Plot-driven vs. Character-driven
Novels
 In my classes, 75% of the students answered
they like plot-driven novels and 25% of
them answered they like character-
driven novels..

5. Today’s Character-driven Novel
 Character-driven novel
 All the Little Live Things (1967)
 Written by Wallace Stegner
 I’s a story about a young woman who
dies from cancer. The story is told by a
narrator who is a retired man.

6. The title of the Introduction in
All the Little Live Things (1967)
 Now you see how it feels like when you lose
a beautiful young friend with cancer.
The more emotionally you’re attached to
your friend, the more you’ll feel sad.

7. Introduction in
All the Little Live Things (1967)
 Joe Allstone is shocked by the
death of Marian Catlin who is a
neighbor of Joe’s.
 Joe says, “Nevertheless, Marian has
invaded me, and though my mind may not
have changed, I will not be the same.”
(11)
 “Be open, be available, be exposed, be
skinless. Skinless? Dance around the
bones.” (14)

8. Introduction in
All the Little Live Things (1967)
Readers still don’t know what really happened at the
beginning of the novel.
Joe’s monologue is his struggle to recover
from the shock he received from Marian’s death.
Joe says that he must accept all the miseries.
Later, readers will see Marian’s natural
philosophy: all the human beings are
born, become parents, and die.

9. Chapter One
Subchapter 1
 In the subchapter 1, the narrator Joe
Allstone introduces the characters of this
novel in the first subchapter.

10. Chapter One
Subchapter 2
 The scenery in California is
described through the eyes of the narrator
who is taking a walk.
 Jim Peck, a young man who reminds him of
Caliban from Shakespeare’s play Tempest
comes into his view.

11. Chapter One
Subchapter 2
 The following quotation is the appearance
of Jim Peck who parasites in Joe’s private
land.
 His brown eyes, extraordinarily
large and bright, gleamed out of
that excess of hair, and his teeth,
badly spaced, the eyeteeth long
and pointed, were bared in a
hanging, watchful, half-crazy. (23)

12. Chapter One
Subchapter 2
 The narrator’s wife Ruth gives Jim
Peck permission to stay and live in their
private land.
 Joe doesn’t like the idea, but Ruth always
thinks that their son Curtis would still be alive
if they had given him another chance. That
is why Ruth is very sympathetic to Jim Peck.

13. Chapter One
Subchapter 3
 Following is the description of Jim Peck
when he was building a tree house in Joe’s
property .
 “Every week there was a renewed outbreak
of sawing and hammering.” (41)
 Jim Peck had promised the Allstones that
he would just spread a tent, but
the promise was a lie.

14. Chapter One
Subchapter 4
 The narrator talks with his wife Ruth．Ruth
says, “Well, we let him camp there,
and we didn’t say he couldn’t
have his friends in”. (46)
 After all Jim Peck brought in friends and
caused lots of troubles.

15. Chapter Two
 In this chapter, the narrator says that not
only God likes Paradise but Evil does so too.
Pesky bugs, weeds, and small
animals swarm to his vegetable
garden.

16. Chapter Two
Subchapter 1
 Marian comes to talk to Joe for the first time.
Joe says, “you can’t simply ignore the
struggle for existence. There are good kinds
of life and bad kind of life.”
 Marian retorts, “Bad is what conflicts
with your interest.”(58) Joe and
Marian become friends.

17. Chapter Two
Subchapter 1
 In addition to the main characters, there is
already a mention about a minor character,
Tom Weld’s son. A landowner Tom Welds
and his son are both unsophisticated
characters. They play important roles in the
last climactic scene of this novel. A
gelding begins to run around wildly. The
cause of the unruly gelding was the
noise of the bulldozer that
Tom Welds was driving.

18. Chapter Two
Subchapter 2
 Tom Welds had sold 20 acres to a developer
and Joe bought five acres from it. The Welds
family keeps Labrador dogs and the dogs
eat the chickens of the LoPresti family. Julie
is the daughter’s name of the
LoPrestis. Julie also plays a very
important role in the climactic
scene near the end of the story. She was
riding on a gelding and the horse starts
running wildly surprised by the noise of the
bulldozer.

19. Chapter Tree
Subchapter 1
 Joe Allstone simply wanted to retire
from work, but the life betrayed him. Tom
Welds sold his land to some people and Joe’s
house, the LoPresiti’s house, and Marian
Catlin’s small cottage were close
together.
 Debbie, Marian’s daughter looks
like this: "Six or so, her hair pulled back in a
pony tail from her thin wedge of a face, her
eyes lost behind owlish little-girl glasses”. (83)

20. Chapter Tree
Subchapter 1
 Marian looks like this: “a thin girl in a
faded denim shirt”. (84)
 Marian defends Jim Peck by saying, “I just think
you shouldn’t judge a person by how much hair
he’s got.” (86) and “Everybody’s got his
peculiarities”. (88)
 Peck’s figure is as follows: “I saw him there
among them in his orange suit, a satyr
come to the picnic.” (89)

21. Chapter Tree
Subchapter 2
 After a description of beautiful scenery, the
narrator describes Jim Peck: “the
shape of Disorder stands a little apart,
in shadow, gleaming darkly, the orange suit
like a gross flower against the brown spring-
fallen leaves.” (90)

22. Chapter Tree
Subchapter 3
Joe says, “I found an insulated electric cable
crawling out of the cut bank and drooping into
the creek bed.” (104) Thus, Joe finds that
Jim Peck was stealing electricity. He
wanted to destroy Jim Peck’s tree house. Then
why can’t he do that?

23. Chapter Tree
Subchapter 3
The narrator Joe Allstone can’t destroy
the tree house because Marian’s
daughter Debby would be
disappointed. The narrator says, “What,
destroy the tree house that was Debby’s
delight, and thus destroy Marian’s pleasure in
seeing her child happy, and her satisfaction at
living her way into the new place?” (105)

24. Chapter Four
Subchapter 1
 The following quotation is very beautiful.
 “…on clear mornings we may look out
our windows and see the redwood
screeds of the patio wearing a pelt
of frost.” (108)
 Patio is an outdoor space that is attached to a
house. In this scene, we are able to enjoy the
contrast through this description of the
redwood patio that is covered
with white frost.

25. Chapter Four
Subchapter 1
 However, Marian’s memory
belongs to the summer, “She
smells in the memory of sun, sage,
dust, the faintly dry tannic odor
of sun-beaten redwood, above all
of tarwood.” (109)

26. Chapter Four
Subchapter 1
 Curtis, a disobedient, self-centered, revolting
son of Joe Allstone’s, is already
dead.
 Jim Peck is all over this novel and he is used
as a character that represent
vulnerable and unsympathetic
young people like him and Curtis.

27. Chapter Four
Subchapter 1
 There is a hint of connecting the details
of the novel and its theme. How can
we best describe scenes, if we would like to
communicate the main theme? In this novel,
the answer is in the contrast of life
and death, active and inactive,
happiness and misery. All the inner
feelings of the main characters are
connected to the scenery.

28. Chapter Four
Subchapter 1
 In this subchapter, even though only the
name of the neighboring people are
mentioned, the names make us feel
as if they are really alive.
 Joe decides to buy a gelding for Marian
and Debby: “So we drove them around
looking at stables and ranches until we
found a fifteen-year-old piebald gelding,
marbled like a cake even to the eyes.” (116)

29. Chapter Four
Subchapter 2
 “ …John, Dave Weld, and the
stable man unloading the
piebald” (117)
 In this scene, they are unloading the horse
out of the truck. After this, while they were
building a fence for the horse, Jim Peck was
practicing yoga.

30. Chapter Four
Subchapter 3
 The following is the comment on Jim Peck by Marian:
“They don’t push anybody around. They treat
children like people. Debby adores them.” (126)
 On the same page there is a reference that Julie,
who is Fran LoPresti’s daughter, comes to visit Jim
Peck regularly. Marian says,“They might
think it was a joke to initiate them.” (126)
 “Initiate” in this particular page means smoking pot
and drinking beer. Marian is saying that it was Jim
Peck’s joke that he gave marijuana to the15 year old
girl. Marian is open to the things Jim Peck
was doing.

31. Chapter Four
Subchapter 3
 I think the following words of Marianis in the center of her
argument: “They aren’t opposed to self-
discipline, only to the traditional
conventional kind that they think are
antilife.” (128)
 On the other hand, Joe says, “He’s improvising his exercises, is
he?” and this shows that Joe doubts about the authenticity of Jim
Peck’s yoga. Next sentence summarizes Joe’s idea of criticism against
Jim Peck: “You can’t open your mouth or move
your hand without living by rules, generally
somebody else’s, and that goes for those
birdbrains across the creek, too.” (128)

32. Chapter Four
Subchapter 4
 At the beginning of the subchapter, Joe is
picking up empty beer cans that Jim Peck
threw away. “So I went on picking up my
daily beer cans along the lane where the
freedom force threw them,….” (128) Further
more, Peck is called “The Most High” and
“Newcomers are not allowed to see Peck”．
By these words, we are directed to see how
ridiculous Jim Peck is.

33. Chapter Four
Subchapter 4
 Many university students come to
live with Jim Peck in June when the
semester is over. “Many nights we saw them
sitting around a fire and heard them
singing.” (130)
 Some of the members were promiscuous:
“Margo was a founder of something called
the Committee for Sexual Freedom…” (131)
“Promiscuous” means“having sex with a lot
of people.”

34. Chapter Four
Subchapter 5
 The following is at the end of this
subchapter: “…occasionally a philosopher
was his [Jim Peck’s] source. More often, his
enthusiasms were straight out of old James
Dean movies and Ginsberg poems.”
(133) Ginsberg’s name is also in the following
sentence. Curtis’s girlfriend sent a box of
Curtis’s books to Joe after he died. “Miller,
Albee, Kerouac, Sartre, Genet, the Marquis
de Sade, Ginsberg, Burrows – a poison
garland from the Grove.” (158)

35. Chapter Four
Subchapter 5
 Joe hears from Marian that Jim Peck will
start “Professor Peck’s Outdoor Academy”.
That sounds totally absurd for Joe
because Jim Peck is a “Squatter, Nester,
Intruder, Interloper, Trespasser.” (137)

36. Chapter Four
Subchapter 5
 Jim Peck thinks that what he is going to
make is a “University of Free Mind”.
Marian is sympathetic to Jim
Peck: “They are just thoughtless. If you
unbend and get to know them better you’d
probably like them. I like them.” (138) Joe
answers to her: “You like whatever
you look on.”

37. Chapter Four
Subchapter 5
 Marian says, “I do feel sorry for him.
People his age have every right to
be appalled at the world they find
themselves in, the bomb and all
the rest of it.” (140) Joe says that only the guys
like Jim Peck will push the button of a-bomb. Joe
does not like the temperament of Jim Peck who
remains aloof from the real world. Joe says,
“Somebody push the button, or one of our
improvements will backfire, and our technical
tinkering will finally destroy all life, and ourselves with
it.” (142) And Marian says, “I don’t believe it.”
(142)

38. Chapter Four
Subchapter 5
 Marian says, “Order is the basis of
everything. John and I sort of believe
Teilhard de Chardin that an evolution
is only a perfecting of consciousness. Do
you?” (143) And to be able to perfect the
consciousness, “we have to risk
disorder.” (144)
ピエール・テイヤール・ド・シャルダン（Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin，1881年5月1日 - 1955年4
月10日）フランス人のカトリック司祭（イエズス
会士）で、古生物学者・地質学者、カトリック思
想家

39. Chapter Four
Subchapter 5
 Then Joe says, “The trouble with Peck,
he doesn’t realize that the world
he lies in is holding itself together
in desperation, with sticking
plaster and patching cement
and Band-Aids, and needs the support
of every member.” (145) Joe’s above words
sound appropriate.

40. Chapter Four
Subchapter 5
 Joe and Marian thus argue over
Jim Peck. When Marian asks Joe why he
allows Jim Peck to stay in his property, he
says that he doesn’t want to be
regarded as illiberal.

41. Chapter Four
Subchapter 6
 This subchapter is a letter that is addressed
to Marian dated July 3. Joe did not mail
the letter, but he writes everything
about his son Curtis in this letter.
 Joe could never open Curtis’s heart and he
blames his own impatience for that. Joe
tried to make Curtis follow the rules, but “He
wanted not one scrap of it, he didn’t agree
with a single value I had.” (150)

42. Chapter Four
Subchapter 6
 Joe Allston later recalls his own attitude: “She
(Marian) taught me the stupidity of
the attempt to withdraw and be
free of trouble and harm”. (286)
 Joe’s biggest problem used to be his son Curtis’s
inability to grow up and behave as a responsible
adult.
 Joe thought that he could escape from
everything by retirement, but he learned that it is
impossible to be free from trouble.

43. Chapter Four
Subchapter 6
 Curtis never became a
responsible adult. We cannot find any
solution to change a rebellious young man
into a responsible citizen in this novel. We
see the despair of an old man
whose son never became a
decent adult.

44. Chapter Four
Subchapter 6
 The following is Joe’s idea that the 20th
century corrupted Curtis: “It
encouraged him to hunt out the
shoddy, the physical, the self-
indulgent, the shrill, and the
vulgar, and to call these things
freedom, and put them above Roman
virtue…” (152) “Shoddy” means inferior in
quality.

45. Chapter Four
Subchapter 6
 Next sentence shows Curtis’s
weaknesses: “He was drunken,
disorderly, and promiscuous from
early adolescence.” (152) After this
sentence, he list Curtis’s other follies.

46. Chapter Four
Subchapter 6
 Then Joe told Curtis about his own follies:
“Trying to explain myself, I told
him my own life, including some
shameful episodes, …” (160)

47. Chapter Four
Subchapter 6
 Joe tells us his background: “But I had
been raised on the run by an
unfortunate woman whose first
husband, my father, shot himself
in the barn,…” (162) This episode shows
how life was hard for him. In the next
quote, Joe summarizes his
attitude toward Curtis.

48. Chapter Four
Subchapter 6
 Curtis could have disagreed with
us incessantly if we had felt in him
some integrity that gave his
disagreement weight. We
couldn’t. I have to blame myself for not
finding any way of reaching him, but I
can’t feel that either Ruth or I had much to
do with his corruption. (152)

49. Chapter Four
Subchapter 6
 In the previous statement, Joe says that he
couldn’t feel integrity in Curtis. Even though
Joe blames himself for not trying to reach
Curtis, he doesn’t blame himself for Curtis’s
corruption. As a conclusion of this
chapter, Joe says that nothing
went well.

50. Chapter Five
Subchapter 1
 In this subchapter, the topics are about their
cat, gopher, and king snake.

51. Chapter Five
Subchapter 2
 Marian comes to see Joe and Ruth. Until she
came, they were playing with water.
Marian seems to be suffering from sunstroke.
Marian’s beautiful figure is
described. Marian recites some lines
from Robert Frost and that gives us
impression that she is living with all her might.

52. Chapter Five
Subchapter 2
 Scenes become bright with Marian
presence. It is probably because
we are seeing things through Joe’s
viewpoint and feeling. Joe says, “Would I have
so doted on this girl if she had not been maimed and
threatened? Was it to herself or danger that I
responded with so much anxious solicitude?” (178)
 doted溺愛したlove someone very much
 maimed傷つけられるwounded seriously
 solicitude 心配 anxiety

53. Chapter Five
Subchapter 2
 Before this quotation, Marian talks
about her ideas of nature. She
says that oases and vegetable
gardens are valuable because
there is hot weather and deserts
in the nature. Her idea is different from
Joe’s idea of cherishing the vegetables in
the garden. Her idea is to see values
in everything.

54. Chapter Five
Subchapter 2
 On page 80, Joe had said, “Love is a
carrier of death – the only thing,
in fact, that makes death
significant.” There is a similarity and
analogy between “desert” and
“death”, and between
“vegetable garden” and “love”.

55. Chapter Five
Subchapter 2
 Joe says to Marian, “Pain is poison! Don’t go
hunting for it. Never praise it. Avoid it all you
can and beat it if you must, but never never
mistake it for something
desirable!” (79)Joe extremely
likes Marian and that is why he cares so
much about her and her death is a very big
issue for him.

56. Chapter Five
Subchapter 2
 Even if we love someone and we feel
deeply sorry about his or her loss, we cannot
reverse the process of life and death. We all
have to accept the reality of death. I think
this reality is common to all the
serious character-driven novels.

57. Chapter Five
Subchapter 3
 Fran LoPresti called Joe to come to see the
sculpture that she made. So Joe, Ruth, and
Marina go to visit the LoPresti’s. The following
is the description of the sculpture: “The neck was a
hammer handle wrapped with leather like the neck of
one of those African women stretched with circle after
circle of copper wire. The face was composed only of
the hammers down-hooking claws….” (187) Joe
thought that the sculpture represents Fran’s
daughter Julie.

58. Chapter Five
Subchapter 3
 A very short anecdote about a dangerous
relationship between parents and their son is
inserted. . The son wrecked their
family car, so they took his
learner’s license. Their son killed
them by ax. The parents never
understood that the son wanted
to do the same things as his
friends.

59. Chapter Five
Subchapter 4
 The following quotation makes us feel the
taste of July Fourth Party at the LoPresti. Let’s
enjoy this vivid talk.
 My God, did you walk? You poor souls.
What’s all the cold-weather gear,
Joe? Man, you out of your mind?
Hello, Ruth. Hello Marian, where’s your
handsome husband? Still off with
those lady seals? (192)

60. Chapter Five
Subchapter 4
 A party guest Annie Williamson was a
veterinarian, raiser of beagles, and her voice
was like a man’s voice. Joe asks Annie
Williamson a question, “What kind of dog is
Fran’s statue?” Annie says, “Pointer ?” Joe
says,“It’s an Ashcan Hound.” Then Fran’s
expression turned to be disappointed, raged,
and showed hatred. This episode is a
subplot that leads toward the blow-
up against Jim Peck. Joe was drunk
and upset about his own joke.

61. Chapter Five
Subchapter 5
 The party is still going on.
 “I could see two couples dancing, trying in
their drink to be as young as their children,
doing the frug of the watusi or the jerk, one
of those rope-climbing, joint-dislocatin
dances.” (206)
 I think the above description is a good
example of dynamic description. We can
describe not only static scenes but also
dynamic movements like this scene.

62. Chapter Five
Subchapter 5
 Joe, Ruth, and Marian got out of Fran LoPresti’s party.
 “By the time I reached the pasture I could see the
golden grass. The sky spread out, full of dim stars.
From back of me radiated the full renewed
volume of the party’s noise.” This is the
noise of the party they just got out of.
“Then I heard sounds from ahead and below. I
stopped and listened: a loud banging and pounding,
and when it ended, a clamor of shouts
and laughter….” (207) This is Jim Peck’s
party.

63. Chapter Five
Subchapter 6
 Joe drops in to Marian’s house on his way home
from Fran’s party. Then Joe knows Marian’s
serious condition:“They gave her no
hope that they could save her,
radiation would only slow things
down. Radiation was hard on the patient,
which was all right, but the worst was that none
could say what it might do to the fetus.” (213)
 Fetus means a young human before birth. The
condition of Marian’s cancer was the worst kind.

64. Chapter Five
Subchapter 7
 Joe hears the noisy voice of Jim Peck and
his followers as soon as he got out of
Marian’s house. “Gimme that BANG
BANG BANG, Gimme that BANG
BANG BANG, Gimme that BANG
BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG
BANG!” (215)

65. Chapter Five
Subchapter 7
 Joes goes into the place where they were
having a party. The following is Joe’s inner
voice: “Right where they all
wanted to be, out of their skulls.
Well, that would be enough
disturbance for one evening.”
(217-218)

66. Chapter Five
Subchapter 7
 Joe sees, “a hasty tangle of limbs,
bare skin, the white eyes of startled turning faces
a swatch of long dark hair” (218) in the tree
house twenty feet above the ground. Joe
shouts, “Turn off the damn noise!”
Joe had drunk a lot of alcohol at Fran’s party.
Joe tells them to move the cars immediately
and they are gone. I think this is the
climactic scene of Joe and Jim
Peck’s confrontation.

67. Chapter Six
Subchapter 1
 Joe meets John at the airport. John is a marine
biologist and doing his research in Alaska. Joe
says, “She won’t take any treatments.
She says they might harm the
baby.” (224)
 Both Joes and John want to save Marian, so
they do not understand why she wants to save
her baby, not herself. “How can they
make a statement like that, that
she hasn’t a chance?”(226)

68. Chapter Six
Subchapter 1
 Joe takes John to his home and Joe sees Jim
Peck then. Jim Peck says he came to explain,
“…people get hung up, especially
kids. Parents ride them, they can’t
make it in school, love problems, all
that. They‘re shut in, all tangled up
in rules, all screwed up, you know. I
mean, there have to have ways
out, they have to tear out of the
net….” (229)

69. Chapter Six
Subchapter 1
 In this novel, Stegner created the opposition
between Joe Allstone and Jim Peck. Jim
Peck being an outlaw, this part is
necessary because Jim Peck has
to be against everything that
binds him.
 In the following conversation between Joe
and Jim, Jim asks Joe to give him permission
to stay and Joe says no.

70. Chapter Six
Subchapter 2
 Jim Peck comes back and asks Joe to keep
his personal possessions.
 “I’ll have to leave the stuff in the shed till
later. All right?”
 It was not a request, it was still a
challenge, I shrugged.
 “All right.” (234)

71. Chapter Six
Subchapter 2
 After a week, Joe doesn’t feel well
about chasing out Jim Peck. On one
hand, he did it in anger, not after reflection. On
another hand, he knows that Marian will regret
their going. Joe says, “She (Marian) had
a mystical confidence that by
trying many things they might
eventually learn something that we
who tried little would never learn.”
(236) Thus, Joe regrets that he
drove them out.

72. Chapter Six
Subchapter 3
 After chasing out Jim Peck, Joe was kept at
arms length by Fran and Julie. Marian
was preparing for dying in July
and August, resting most of the
time and forcibly swallowing
food. Joe kept visiting her many times a
day.

73. Chapter Six
Subchapter 3
 Marian did not want to keep
alive as “a morphine vegetable”.
She says, “I swear we never know half
what life means, not even what it feels like.
Birth and death are the greatest
experiences we ever know, and
we smother them in drugs and
twilight sleep.” (240) Smother means to
suffocate by preventing free breathing.

74. Chapter Six
Subchapter 3
 In the subchapter 3, Marian expresses her
idea of death. While Marian thinks
that death is natural, Joe cannot
accept her death in her young
age. Of course she also would like to keep
living and have fun with her husband,
daughter, and friends, if it is possible.

75. Chapter Six
Subchapter 4
 Marian is indifferent to her daughter Debby
because she wants her to be more
independent.

76. Chapter Six
Subchapter 5
 Joe and Ruth are living for the
Catlins now.
 “Holding ourselves available for
Catlin’s need, we accepted no
invitations and issued none.” (252)
 “Ruth cooked and cleaned and laundered,
I played driver and yardman.” (252)

77. Chapter Six
Subchapter 5
 The following quote is not directly
contributing to the explanation of the plot,
but this is good because it explains why
young people sometimes do
ridiculous things.

78. Chapter Six
Subchapter 5
 She (Julie) won’t agree to an
abortion. Why should she? She
says they gave her pills and she
threw them away. She wanted to
get pregnant to spite Fran, and
now she has, and that’s it. (257)

79. Chapter Six
Subchapter 6
 Marian’s condition becomes extremely
bad and she is carried into the hospital.
She comes back with a nurse after three
days. She is suffering from cancer and at the
same time pregnant. Death and life
are in her body at the same time.

80. Chapter Six
Subchapter 6
 Joe and Ruth are sitting on the porch of
their house. The quiet atmosphere
described in the following quote
is in clear contrast against
Marian’s critical condition.

81. Chapter Six
Subchapter 6
 For a long time that evening we
sat on the terrace, while the
swallows and later the bats
sewed the darkening air together
over the oaks, and the crude gouge
that would become a road faded into dust,
then dark. (262)

82. Chapter Six
Subchapter 7
 This is a very short chapter. Marian’s
condition worsens, so she has to go
back to the hospital.

83. Chapter Seven
Subchapter 1
 Joe takes Marian to the hospital in his car.
They see Julie on the horse, and the also see
Dave Weld’s bulldozer is scraping the
mountain. There comes Jim Peck to get his
leftover. In front of his Honda motorcycle, his
friends are riding on the Volkswagen bus.
Weld’s bulldozer is above them. Joe Allstone
uses the horn.

84. Chapter Seven
Subchapter 1
 “ In the narrow space between bus and
motorcycle the gelding was suddenly
wild. … I heard hoofs on hollow plank, Julie
screamed, a long, terrible cry, and they
were down, invisible behind the Volkswagen
and the dust.” (278)

85. Chapter Seven
Subchapter 1
 This is truly an over-dramatic
scene. They have to kill the horse
and remove the body to the
shoulder of the road.
 “We struggled, slipping in thick blood,
dragging at legs, mane, tail, prying at
broken legs….”(281)

86. Epilogue
 It is February. Joe is still under the shock
of Marian’s death.
 “Peace was not in anything I saw or smelled or
felt.” (284)
 “She taught the stupidity of the
attempt to withdraw and be free
of trouble and harm. That was as
foolish as Peck’s version of ahimsa and the
states.” (286)
 Ahimsa is Buddhist doctrine of nonviolence. The
lesson Joe learned is to know that death cannot
be avoided.

87. Conclustion
 What made Joe so much shocked to tell
such a long story? Marian’s death is used as
a key incident and motivation to tell a story.
Joe is an viewpoint character and Marian is
a heroic character. What was a hardship
that Marian had to overcome? It was death.
Marian could overcome death
by dying. She is the hero of this
story.

88. Conclustion
 Jim Peck, on the other hand, has
done a number of unfavorable
things. Joe Allstone repeatedly says why
Jim Peck has to be destroyed. Marian, on
the other hand, doesn’t think that Jim Peck’s
activities are evil. She rather thinks that they
are natural. Thus, Marian accepted
everything she was given: good and bad,
and birth and death.

89. Conclustion
 Stegner is asking us whether we can accept
and forgive everything including birth and
death.

90. SWBST
 What is SWBST?
 Someone (Main characters)
 Wanted (What they wanted)
 But (problems they have)
 So (How they solved them)
 Then (What do you think will happen then?)

91. SWBST
 If we see young people as the main
characters….
 S: Marian, Jim Peck, Curt and other young people in
the 1960’s
 W: They (especially Curt and Peck) were seeking
freedom from social rules. They sought after
counter culture.
 B: They tried many untraditional things: they sang,
drank, and smoked. They caused noise problem,
pregnancy of the minor, and death.

92. SWBST
 S: They had to leave the land. Some of
them were indicted. Well, this doesn’t look
like a solution. However, we can still say that
they got freedom even if it was only
for a short time.
 T: They will create many culturally new
things. Actually people of that generation
created all sorts of things we are using today
from rock music to computer networks.

93. SWBST
 If we see Joe as the main
character….
 S: Joe Allstone
 W: He wanted to retire from everything.
 B: Jim Peck comes to live in his property and
Marian comes to live in his neighborhood: The
new situation brings him noise problem
and looking-after-a-cancer-patient
problem. These are just external problems.

94. SWBST
 B: His real internal problem is his
lack of sympathy: He says,
“Sympathy I have failed in,
stoicism I have barely passed. But
I have made straight A in
irony….” (14)Even though Joe did
right things, he was unsympathetic
and ….

95. SWBST
 S: Joe finally chases out Jim Peck, but
Marian dies.
 T: He will be depressed for a while…and
then….

96. Thank you for listening!
 In the end Joe has to accept the
severe reality of losing loved ones.
Stegner’s novels are full of
characters like him whose
personality has a little problem
and All the Little Live Things is
one of such character-driven
novels.