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Making Sense in God's Country

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Submitted By jenniferbabylone
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Making sense in God’s country.

Introduction

Percival Everett‘s novel God’s Country, positions race in the forefront of the narrative in a most satirical and subversive way. Typically, the western poses a bad guy against a good guy, with the bad guy dressed in black, and the good guy wearing white. Everett juxtaposes black and white in an altogether different way, revising the pattern of the western through its portrayal of character.

Making sense in God’s country, need to be dealt through different protagonist’s point of view. For instance, what makes sense for Marder doesn’t necessarily make sense for Bubba or the Injuns. And conversely, what makes sense for the heathens doesn’t make sense for the Yuk Yuks.

Let us study what’s the conception of “making sense” for the baddies (the white men) and the goodies (the Indians, the black man).

Paragraph 1

In God’s Country, Everett uses the western genre to demonstrate the absurdities inherent in racism. God’s Country‘s revision of the mythic West and the western genre is seen through the myopic eyes of an ignorant white man: Marder.

When Happy Bear gives a horse to Jake, Marder is amazed “I was fit to be tied. Didn’t make no sense, a free horse. And for a child. What was wrong with these people? Heathens.” (64) According to him, this didn’t make sense and was necessarily a misdeed “it was no doubt an attempt to corrupt his young mind and trick him into trusting the savages.”

Everett places his story in 1871; six years after the American slaves were emancipated. According to Marder’s good sense, two hundred years of oppression and dehumanization should be overcome in six short years “Christ, man, it‘s 1871, ain’t you people ever going to forget about that slavery stuff” (24). Bubba is demonized in a number of ways in the eyes of Marder because of nothing more than his skin

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