Sensing her father’s distress because her mother had disappeared, Night Song’s daughter went on a search for Grandmother because her mother had told her that if she ever needed help, Grandmother could help her. Having been lured away from her husband and young daughter, Night Song mourned and refused to eat until she died. Believing she had been betrayed, Grandmother tricked Night Song into changing back into a serpent, without telling her she could never return to her human form. Night Song gave up her serpent form to be married to Hawk Man, also an enchanted being. At one time, this lonely serpent had a daughter named Night Song. The trapped serpent is a lamia, an enchanted being able to change once in its life to his human form, then back to its animal form. The tree is the same one where Puck now takes shelter. It tells how a serpent came to be trapped in a jar entangled in the roots of the loblolly pine.  Meanwhile, another story is told about events that took place a thousand years before. He takes up residence in an old, dying loblolly pine tree. Puck finds himself alone on the creek bed. Puck survives the drowning attempt, but his mother does not. He stuffs the two into a burlap bag and throws them into a creek. The calico cat runs out to try to save her baby, but Gar Face grabs her as well. The naughty kitten is spotted by Gar Face who grabs him.  Ranger was shot in the leg, and he has been chained to the house ever since as his punishment for betraying the man.Īlthough the kittens have been warned to stay in the underneath, under the porch, Puck is drawn out by the sun one morning. Ranger had helped Gar Face in his hunts until one night when Ranger stepped between Gar Face’s gun and a bobcat with a kitten. The problem for Ranger and the cats is that he is chained to the porch of a cruel man named Gar Face. When her kittens are born, Ranger takes over the role as father figure for the two kittens, Puck and Sabine.  The story is filled with the Native American view of interconnectedness between people, animals, and plants.Ī pregnant calico cat, abandoned by her family, is drawn to a lonely hound dog named Ranger when she hears the sound of his mournful baying. Two kittens and an old hound dog give a centuries old serpent the chance to champion love, a choice she forfeited years prior with her own daughter. Promises, regret, love, and loneliness are all facets of the book “The Underneath” by Kathi Appelt.

The underneath appelt

In these cases ‘What is the meaning of it all?’ is not a question but a cry of despair from those who feel washed up personally, socially, historically or politically.ĭespite Eagleton’s metaphysical pretensions and meanderings, which constitute the greater part of his book, Raising questions about ‘The Meaning of Life’ outside of metaphysics is usually an expression of that moment when an individual finds their life so messed up they wonder if it has any meaning.  That said, it is hard not to see this book as a sophistical device to do the opposite of what we normally expect from Eagleton, namely, to provide a vehicle for the intrusion of a political perspective into a seemingly philosophical enquiry. When you have been such a wide-ranging writer and have, at the end of your formal academic career, written a particular account of the story and meaning of a life, your own, perhaps there is nothing is left to produce except a more abstract study of the meaning of all lives.  He even wrote a lively and entertaining autobiography, The Gatekeeper.(2) His great strength was his ability to see in the academic and intellectual world the hidden hand of politics. The metaphor acutely points to the fact that Eagleton has lost his political way.Ī prolific author, Eagleton has written original and seminal works on literature, ideology, and postmodernism. But it is our own inability to envision more than this spontaneous self-expression that explains its appeal. There is something charming in this metaphor of working creatively with others especially as it is something done entirely for its own sake. When there is no collective political action it is still possible for individuals to make music together. This form of ‘collectivity’ is both a replacement for lost forms of radical social and political tradition and an offer of something seemingly positive in our atomised and individualised society a metaphor that has an ironic echo of Marx’s vision of a future communist society as ‘an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’. We discover at the end of this short book that the ‘meaning of life’, for Eagleton, can be expressed in the metaphor of a jamming jazz band. Posted on ‘The Meaning of Life’ by Terry Eagleton  Oxford University Press, 2007.

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