The Mad Trapper by Rudy Weibe

This paper seeks to show the comparison and the scrutiny of “"The Mad Trapper"” as a novel and its adaptation as a film. Both as a book and as a film it provides a good fiction which attracts an affluent legacy of folks, fables and myths. Rudy Wiebe’s recent novel The Mad Trapper (1980), the legend, presents a basis for the frame. Further than any distress with chronological events, the writer categorically depicts legendary dimensions to intertwine his fiction into conflict. Weibe’s argument, nevertheless, is not merely involving thermo and Albert Johnson; his contention lies amid the impending desires of self independence and reliability and the problem of multifaceted and distant progress.

On the other hand, “The Mad trapper” is also a film that draws its plot from the novel. The film showcases staging or a dramatization of a search for a certain individual. The search takes place in Canada between the years 1931 and 1932. Albert Johnson was considered hermit, this means that he operated as an introvert. He made few associations; contact and even friends. In 1932 generated a demanding manhunt is considered an Arctic legend. In approximately one month and a half amid snowstorm and freezing winter, he cunningly escaped from a group of trappers, armed forces, Indians who in their first time were using a two-way radio and an aircraft. He is being sought for allegedly being implicated in shoot-outs, murdering one officer and austerely injuring two others.

One of the differences between the movie and the book lies in the settings or rather the surrounding in both the movie and the book. The book depicts an exemplary factual tale, one of mountain myths, situated in 1930's Northern parts of Canada. The book portrays an account of C...

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In the movie adaptation, Millen sympathizes and empathizes with Johnson something that is not well brought in the book. It is very easy to see from the movie that the two men are alike and perhaps as different from the other characters as they are alike. Millen is just as reluctant to go after Johnson as we are to see him go after Millen.

The plot of the book has been significantly reworked for dramatic effect. The most obvious of these changes is the role that constable Millen plays. ‘Wop’ May who is instrumental in tracking the ‘Mad Trapper’ is questionable.

The film is a fairly faithful adaptation of the book. The amateurish style of the book gives it some appeal as a more sleek and sophisticated style wouldn’t evoke a sense of angst’ desperation and confusion that the novel does.

Works Cited

Wiebe, R. (2003). The Mad Trapper. New York: Red Deer Press.