Raintree County III 1-16-21

 I offer this example of the ideas put forth by Raintree County (the him is the novel's hero, John Shawnessy):

Then it seems to him that only through a weakness of the will is the past relinquished. A human life had a dimension that wasn't perfectly understood. In this dimension, the whole river of one's life existed all at once, a legendary symbol written across the face of time. And the source of the river was in the gulf to which flowed as well as the spring from which it rose....

Raintree County, p. 737.

I read in those sentences Albert Einstein and William James and James Joyce and William Faulkner. This paragraph ends with what is in context a judgment on the antebellum South:

...And if one were to understand the enigma of a twisted life on the land, where would one begin, except in a daguerreotypal river flowing past a daguerreotypal house?

Raintree County is not a Northern version of Gone With the Wind. Raintree County hews closer to Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom! by critiquing slavery/racism as a mental illness. Raintree County goes further than Faulkner by having racism drive a major character insane to the point of destroying her only child.

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