Gr.301
Russu Cristian

Narrative Essay

The legend of the Coral Island - NOPOMBALU

The legend of the Coral Island - NOPOMBALU Once upon a time there were a handsome hunter, his name was Lawongo. In the jungle he only hunted wild hogs. The animals often destroyed the villagers' fields. The villagers were very grateful. With Lawongo's help, their fields were safe from the wild hogs. Lawongo was also very great in playing a flute, it was so melodious, like the night butterflies, dancing over the fire. Everybody always enjoyed listening to his flute play. One of the people was a beautiful girl. She always listened attentively, with those passionate eyes looking at him. Lawongo knew there was a beautiful girl who always paid attention to him. Lawongo fell in love with her. The girl also loved him, later they got married. They were very happy. They loved each other and promised to be always together. They would be together until they died. On one night, Lawongo had a strange dream. In his dream he was hunting a very big wild hog. The hog attacked him. He did his best to kill the hog, with monstrous tusks. He used his knife to stab the hog and it finally died.
Its dead body, was as big as the moon in the sky that night. On the next morning, Lawongo went hunting. It was still early in the morning and he did not want to wake his wife up.
In the jungle ha did not see any animals. He could not find any wild hog either. He felt very strange. He walked and he felt very thirsty. He picked a coconut. And when he wanted to open it using his knife, he saw his knife was full of dried blood. He was confused. Suddenly he remembered his wife. Somehow he had a bad feeling about his wife. He immediately went home. When he arrived home, many people were in front of his house. One of the people said,"We're sorry for your wife, Lawongo. Please accept our condolences."
"What happened?" he asked as he rushed into his house. He saw his wife was dead. Her body was full of blood. Lawongo was devastated. He felt guilty. He knew last night he stabbed his wife, while having that nightmare. He then told the villagers…:
"I cannot live without my wife. Please prepare two coffins, one for me and the other one is for my wife."
"No, please don't do it. You are still young and we still need you here. Besides that we still want to hear you play the flute." said one of the villagers.
"Don't worry, I still play the flute for you. Make a hole on the coffin's cover and I’ll play it until I can no longer. If you cannot longer hear my playing, it means I'm dead. After that, you shall go to the beach, where a strange thing will appear from the sea. Do not point at that thing and do not say anything. It is my reincarnation." Later, the villagers buried the two coffins. At the first night, they could still hear his playing. However the sound was getting weaker and weaker. And finally the villagers stopped hearing anything after a few nights.
They did as Lawongo requested. They went to the beach. They all set down on the shore, then, suddenly, a strange thing emerged from the sea. It was very big. They all were surprised. However they did not say anything. The thing finally stopped growing. The villagers used their sampan and came to the thing. It was a coral island. They named the island as Napombalu, which is from the words Napo and Nawalu. Napo means a coral island and Nawalu means a strange thing which turns into an island.

That’s how the coral island Napombalu became to exist, by the legends.

Text Analysis The title of the essay is pretty self explanatory and easy to understand, you can pretty much deduct out of the title, what the story itself will be about , or what will it be centralized around, but, often the theme might be deducted out of the title, in this story’s case, it is not the case.
There isn’t any hidden meaning in the title, neither metaphorically does it have any significant value.

The theme of the text is guilt, or death, in life - together and as so, is in death we walk as well, hand by hand.
Actually, viewed from different perspectives, you can pretty much come to the conclusion that there are several themes to pick from, someone might see Death as the theme, someone might see the theme as devotion, someone might see the theme as guilt, ect.
As there are many opinions, there are just as many themes to be had in this text.

It is hard to actually identify the purpose of this writing, as with the theme, the purpose might be seen differently from different points of view, but I would like to think that, the purpose of this story was – punishment and atonement , to show to the reader that nothing should go unpunished, that for every action, there should be a consequence, even if you are not in control of it sometimes. The effect of a sandbox world.

Hmm, I wouldn’t say that the story was meant to be conveyed to a younger audience, since it has some pretty dramatic turn of events in there, with rash and illogical decisions. If I would have to grade it, the age it was meant for was teen-agers and students, to adults, but to be honest, it’s a bit lacking to be rated for the adult audience, the content, flavor and quality of the text, story and text, isn’t that high, it still doesn’t quite fit with me in that regard, so I would say it is more for students in their teen-ages.

The central idea of this text was probably, as I said previously punishment and atonement , there might be different opinions about this, in part – it also has the devotion idea inside as well, as in – the hunter couldn’t live without his wife, live with the guilt that he had murdered her in his sleep unconsciously , life lost meaning for him, or maybe he just wanted to atone for his sins, who knows what was the true meaning behind this text, maybe there was even something entirely different conveyed to us , that we might have missed.

The usage, what does the story teach us? Honestly, I don’t know – might be one of the previous mentioned topic of the central idea, or might be something entirely different from what we’ve imagined, either way, I’d say – Not to take your actions for granted.

Structural design:
The structural design consists of, introduction, body and conclusion.
In the introduction, or exposition – same thing. It is told to us about the life of a hunter, how he lived. There is no set time , when this story happened, all we get to know is that “It happened once upon a time” and that’s it, so we can only assume from which period is this tale.
In the introduction, we are depicted the emotional portrait of the hunter, he is not described very intensively or detailed, we just get the general picture of a man, that was hunting and protecting his village from wild animals, we could see from those acts that he was selfless and endangering himself for the sake of others, and that he was well-respected for that among his village.
Men and women would look up to him, and I would dare say that he was popular enough to be able to choose whichever bride he wished for, as we see in the beginning, he did indeed fall in love through a mutual relationship.

In the body of the story, it is told about his dream, his nightmare to be exact, and how he went out hunting in the morning, where he felt his uneasiness , after realizing that something is wrong.
It is in this body aswell, where can find the Rising events and Climax, the rising events would be where he would have noticed the blood on the knife, and the anticipation as he rushed back home, slightly drugged with the realization of what he might have done.
And the climax was when he finally arrived home, only to find his wife , bathing in her blood in bed, on which he killed her that night.

The denouement is probably the part where he decided to relinquish his life and join his wife in the second coffin and join her in the other world, so they could be together again.

Evidence, in the text, would could see multiple examples of stylistics , epithets, metaphors, comparisons, similes, hyperboles, ect.
The text of the text, I wouldn’t say that it was very well organized, and the quality of the stylistic devices is rather poor.

In conclusion, I don’t have much to say about the text, except for the fact that, it wasn’t that rich in stylistic devices as you would find in some famous authors books, so this text obviously had no literal success, its just an text made for analysis purposes, it had its slight curve of entertainment, but over-all it was poorly done, the idea and theme could have been expressed much better.
It seems like the text was conjured by some amateur writer, or a student himself, I mean – the story itself, might be a real legend, of some local peninsula, but the way it was retold to us by the author, was rather amateurish.
And the whole mood of this text was rather gloomy for me, it had an interesting climax, and rising events, but the finale was rather dull and meaningless, with a lot of questions of why and where, and why would you even come up with that kind of finale. It seemed a bit far-stretched from reality, but then again – I guess that’s how legends are.