The novel Wolf in White Van features a character who struggles to disconnect himself from the past. This inability prevents him from effectively coping with Trauma that has occurred in his life. You can read the full essay here.
Learn about how Sean utilizes his own contrived world to replace his loss of control in his real life by clicking here.
“Sean attempts to make his life fit into the framework of a game, a set of discrete narrative choices imbued with meaning by the game master and never veering from a controlled path. This choice, which brings Sean even deeper into those fictional worlds he had difficulty separating from reality, is his way of coping with trauma and specifically with the frightening ambiguity of shooting oneself in the face for no discernible reason”
Read the rest here.
John Darnielle’s Wolf in White Van redefines trauma not as a symptom of psychological disorder but as a form of self-medication, a treatment to reign in disturbing thoughts and desires.
Sean uses the game Trace Italian to escape from the real world. Although he becomes separated from reality, in the end, this helps him personally recover from his trauma.
You can read my full argument here.
The controlling idea for my essay was that coping mechanisms are a good thing after a traumatic event, but if the person holds onto the coping mechanism compared to fully recovering the coping mechanism is harmful.
As Sean begins the long journey to recovery, he uses Trace Italian as an escape from the real world. Sean doesn’t want to recover and reach normalcy after the “accident”, rather he prefers to remain isolated in his escape.
In my analysis of Sean Phillips in John Darnielle’s novel, Wolf In White Van, I point out Sean uses his imagination and his role-playing game, Trace Italian, as a distraction to solve his inner emotional problems, as opposed to solving to them. Many will agree that Sean did not properly handle his situation, while others will disagree in saying that his fantasies were the only way to cope with his depression and isolation. However, beyond this small argument, I believe there is something deeper to consider.
In the middle of the Sean’s telling of his story, he shows signs of trying to really solve his own problems by reflecting upon his thoughts and motives before the accident. Yet, as so much time has passed of denying/coping with his problems, whichever you may argue, Sean can no longer identify with his past self – “that younger man was dead” (71-72). Wolf In White Van demonstrates that one can only deny or cope with their problems for so long the core issues of our lives catch up to us and remind us of our pain. These issues must be dealt with, head on, with courage and humility or else they will consume us and take our lives away from us. In the end, Sean Philips took his own life.
You can read my full length argument of Wolf In White Van here.
Featured Image Credit:
When you’ve finished your essay analyzing Wolf in White Van, publish it to your site as a page. Make sure if the page does not show up in your menu automatically that you add the page so that readers can get to it.
Then publish a short blog post that links to your essay and that includes the controlling idea for your essay.
Audience: You should assume an audience that has read Wolf in White Van and thought about it a little bit but who understands the novel not quite as well as you do.
Image: Make certain you have at least one image on your page. I would prefer that the image not be the cover of the novel but that instead you take a phrase or term that your essay addresses and search Flickr to find a CC-licensed image that you can use to illustrate your essay. Make certain you have a good image credit citation on your page.
Peer feedback: Each of you should read (at least) one of your peer’s Wolf essays. You must read the essay by the student you’re assigned to in the table below:
Then you will create a document in the Peer Feedback Docs folder on Google drive that I’ve shared with all of you. Title the document with the name of the student whose essay you are responding to and the title of that student’s essay (in other words, Mady will name her document Kino “[Kino’s Title Here]).
Here is a post with some specific questions for you to address in your feedback, but fundamentally you should approach this task as an opportunity to help this student make their essay better and, in the process to notice what they have done well or not that might help you to recognize strengths or flaws in your own essay when you turn to your own revisions.
Change the title of the draft you published on Friday to indicate that it is a draft essay.
By class on Tuesday, you should revise your own Wolf essay, taking into consideration the feedback you received from your peer and anything you observed in the process of providing feedback on your peer’s essay. Publish the revised essay as a new page and make the draft from Friday a subpage.
As you revise your essay, you should quote from one of your peer’s essays (probably that will be the essay you reviewed, but it does not have to be), which means revising your own argument in some way to include, respond to, resist, or build on something new that you saw in one of your peer’s essays that makes you think about your own argument a little bit differently. Include a link and a works cited entry for your peer’s draft essay.
Publish a reflective blog post that links to the final version of your essay.