Ultimate Creation And Destruction In Jim Crace's The Gift Of Stones

Ultimate Creation and Destruction
Jim Crace’s novel The Gift of Stones, is an intensely compelling novel that expands the world of imagination in an unchanging village of stone workers. The function of the novel is to give and tell stories to those who lack imagination of their own. Shown in Father’s world, as well as the Stoneys world, imagination can tear down both reality and dreams. Creating and destroying imagination and reality becomes the center of the Stoneys world, and is identified as a method of escaping the real world by use of the image of wind. In The Gift of Stones, Jim Crace uses the imagery of wind to explore the tension between imagination and reality.
The distinction between imagination and reality is clearly specified

before the story of Father, Daughter, and Doe even begins. Through the epigraph, Crace immediately establishes the dedication he has as he creates an intriguing story of imagination and reality. The entire story of Father and Daughter is told through the imagination of an archeological team. However, while Crace begins the novel, the epigraph is either forgotten or left unread, and the story that is told becomes reality. Crace displays Fathers talent for storytelling in the first chapter. The reader receives the only truth and actuality of Father’s amputated arm. The reader is given a description of the arm- how the “brackish pus” (1) oozed from his “stump”, or how the “skin was drawn tight across the bone”. These first six sentences of the novel are the only truth about Father’s arm that the reader receives. The ending of reality begins with the start of a story. The reader collects four possible stories of how Father had his arm amputated. Whether it be from birth or an animal, one of the two narrators, Daughter, takes the story that was “his most frequent, detailed repetition” as the truth. Throughout the story that Father tells, there are many chances where the reader may suspect that Father’s ‘truth’ is nothing more than ‘imagination’. However, how the reader perceives Father’s story is necessary to the advancement of the story; the reader is the one who can draw the line between what he or she believes is reality and what is imagination.
Crace’s distinction between imagination and reality utilizes the image of wind as a method of ending and beginning Father’s stories. Located in the third sentence of the first story, wind is the first image shone that is given human characteristics. Personified as “twisting untidy braids in the manes of the horses” (2), the reader immediately recognizes that the wind is a character in Father’s story. Wind correlates directly with the ending and beginning of Father’s storytelling and also when he simply ends one tale so he can start another. As evident on page 31, Father ends his first story with the image of wind. The same wind that he started the passage with: “one small boy that slept on and on for fear of waking to his pain . . . his nightmare blustery and full of stone.” The Stoneys, having planted the idea of uselessness in Father’s young head, create fear in his mind. Crace could have just as easily chosen another word to describe Father’s nightmare, but instead purposefully chose the word “blustery” in an attempt to relate the wind to the ending of a small boy’s potential. Father’s future as a stoney has ended, but the future of the storyteller has just begun. The presentation in Crace’s novel illuminates an intricate affiliation of reality and dream. Father dreams because he is too afraid to face the reality that the realignment of what was before and what was now may possibly be worse. The wind comes as an image to help close the final chapters of the novel. This time, when ships are seen on the horizon, Father does not take off on a quest to meet the sailors. Instead of actually going to talk to them, Father stays with Doe. There exists no story that Father could tell to the Stoney’s that would not be repetitive. Even if the story that he would tell is the truth, Father would be telling the same story with different words. The sailors and the ship represent the ending of the Stoney’s familiar world. Father recognizes that his world is ending as the sailors “sheltered from the wind” (135). His mind attempts to create a story in which Father warns the Stoneys that their “world is coming to an end” (136), but he knows the Stoneys would only take a moment to “marvel at the power of [his] tongue” (136). The Stoney’s persistence proves that even though storytelling is their escape, it is not their salvation.
This same fear would be present in Father’s head until he pursues his freedom- which happens to come in the shape of a ship, a navigational vessel that relies on the wind to guide it. This ships first appearance is told by Father himself, but without the element of wind. There are two scenes where Father loses the fear that the Stoneys have implanted in his mind. Crace begins by hinting that Father has the power to create an exciting tale with “a sea and wind and sky that flung seaweed” (36), but instead establishes that it was “calm and windless” (36). Without wind, there is nothing for Father to fear. Alluding that father is no longer within control of either the metaphorical or literal wind, Father runs after the ship. Father has stopped focusing his fear of the future on himself, and instead turned it into hope. As soon as he decides to follow the ship, Father realizes that he has the power to change the wind, implying that he has begun his adventure as a storyteller. Without any wind around him, Father completely loses his sense of fear. He journeys to the very vessel that requires wind to travel. Father ironically sets out to chase the ship, crosses the threshold and ends up going farther than any other Stoney has before. When coming to view the “world that’s upside down” (38), Father begins by “looking down on wind” (38). This may be viewed with the literal meaning, or it might be viewed as Father overcoming his belief that he is useless and hopeless. Wind is no longer associated with fear, but with the power of his mind.
As well as using the wind as a method of overcoming fear, wind compels the reader to assess his or her own viewpoint on whether Father’s storytelling will be his undoing.

The wind is given human traits since the first chapter of the novel. Father sees the wind as a person- a person with a warning. Although he knows what the wind says, he continuously disobeys it when it warns him to “Go home to your house and fire. Go home” (3). At this point, the wind becomes a symbol for all that is uncertain and unknown in the novel; the wind warns him about the bowman that would shoot his arm with a poisonous arrow. This aspect of the wind stands out in The Gift of Stones as one of the many times that the characters do not head to the wind. Father has imagined himself as a horseman in one of his stories- a horseman who gets to be with Doe. Attempting to live out his fantasy in reality only angers the wind. Once again, it alerts Father that he should simply turn away and go back to his village of realism. He retains his dream, however, and is only awoken by Doe, herself, stating that they must “talk” (90). By staying in the heath, Father is exposed to the horsemen he imagines in his dreams and himself, Daughter, and Doe are all threatened. One of the many versions of Doe’s death leads her on the path walking to the marketplace, in spite of the wind blowing at her back telling her to “Go home” (147). The warnings of the wind are not only in reality, but also in Father’s imagination; it shows that the wind has manifested itself deep into father’s storytelling

mind.
Altogether, Crace is able to use wind in The Gift of Stones, to explore the stress and balance between imagination and reality. The pressure Crace puts on the two themes is shown from the first page of the book, to the last page. Crace utilizes both the endings and beginnings of Father’s and Daughter’s story by embedding the image of wind at the heart of all of the stories told throughout novel.