PRAIRIE AS THE PLACE OF ORIGIN: THAT YELLOW PRAIRIE SKY

PRAIRIE AS THE PLACE OF ORIGIN: THAT YELLOW PRAIRIE SKY

A well-known poet, novelist, essayist, literary critic, Robert Kroetsch is less known for his short story cycle. His first full-length published short story is That Yellow Prairie Sky as he points in his interview with Margaret Laurence. As a writer, Kroetsch is interested in the way he can use stories to communicate and connect to place, the incredible new place he calls Alberta. Kroetsch’s characters in the stories experience difficulties and ordeals of living in the prairie so that their destinies remain “locked between dream and nightmare”. This statement reflects the clash and the difference between the old and the new which Kroetsch explores in his fiction including the Out West Triptych. He anticipates his two visions of life: the apocalyptic vision and the nightmare of the harsh prairie reality, especially during draughts (the idea that he would focus on in The Words of My Roaring), and his visionary view of life, which he advocates, and which is based on a dream of possibility and change and of building up a better future where the promise of the fulfillment of dreams will be reality. The subject of my concern in the paper will be some of the basic motifs, which Kroetsch will develop later in his poetry and fiction, and which he introduces in this short story: prairie re-imagined as the place of origin, prairie as a character, the relationship between man and women, man as victim to cosmic forces, etc.