i have an essay to write. i have never done this before. i need total help,please.
the topic is from a book called 'Barometer Rising'
HUGH MCLENNAN the question is below.
choose any character or speaker/persona from the text and discuss the ways in which the city is negotiated by that character.you will want to think about issues of locomotion,race gender,social class,linguistic affiliation etc....
thanks

More from RS, in an e-mil to me -

I need to find a thesis and also an argument why.



Choose any character or speaker/persona from any of the texts(literary or film) we have covered so far in the course and discuss the ways in which the city is negotiated by that character or speaker/persona you will want to think about issues of locomotion, race, social class ,linguistic affiliation etc…
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Neil Macrae is the main character and the subject in the text , Barometer Rising. The story is centered on him and begins and ends with Neil, who was disgraced in the war overseas and reportedly killed. He is twenty eight year old orphaned nephew of Wain, who returns from France to Halifax. “walking around Halifax all day, as though by moving through familiar streets he could test whether he belonged here and had at last reached home.”(pg1) Halifax provides a safe harbor beyond the reach of the German u-boats. He returns in order to clear his name from the false charges his own uncle Colonel Geoffrey Wain has accused him of. He roams the streets of Halifax seeking redemption for a tragedy on the fields of Europe. Neil is referred to as the ‘flaneur’, who is seeking and scrutinizing the city, the streets from the south end as he moves in the city of Halifax to the north end. When he reaches the top of the citadel, he surveys the town and at that point it makes him feel entirely solitary.

Halifax, being a harbor city makes Neil’s career in ship designing very pertinent. Had the war not intervened he would have been marked for outstanding success. It was an irony of fate which threw him as an officer into his own uncle’s battalion, and an even more bitter order, which was so contradictory that full obedience was impossible. But, that doesn’t suggest that he was a coward. Neil macrae is obsessed by the desire to justify himself at the expense of the man who had, in his opinion, cruelly wronged him. Neil sees the city, the country Canada and believes in it while strolling the northern end of that city Halifax. We see that Neil’s identity is acknowledged, so is that of the city and nation he is trying to negotiate.

McClellan writes about how Canada being colonial struggles for self-respect and self-determination. So, also is Neil fighting to get his identity back. Neil is the hero of the novel. He is the lost son and a post –colonial Canadian, he helps to build from the debris of the old, while symbolically mapping and exploring of his home town. Even the explosion contributes and turns Halifax into an innocent victim. Neil’s life is symbolic to the snow and silence. the author says,” silent persistence of the falling snow” the snow covers up the past and offers a fresh white start, the force of old colonial mindedness has been wiped out, to take the future, the representatives of unconventional and free Canada move in. The city of Halifax, for him is the primary place, which is his home. This is where he could start life all over again. but, as his lover Penelope suggests that,” he knows next to nothing of his own country. Neil macrae says,” A man has to think he hasn’t got a country before he knows what having one means. (pg 358)” Neil’s solution to the identity crisis is a rerooting. when he is strolling the streets of Halifax he discovers the unbreakable bond with his own country. He finds Penelope who is still waiting for him.

For Neil to get into perspective, Halifax exactly provides him with being historic strategic and colonial. As the city was not easy to define so the family that was made up by Neil, Penelope and Jean. When macrae thinks of Canada he experiences,” a furious desire for expression.” For Neil macrae the city of Halifax is presented as a primary place , which is his home it is for him ,where he could start life all over again. He is connected with the city and Canada. He unites his future. “For better or worse” (pg218.) These words from the marriage ceremony imply that his marriage is to Canada. The birth of their daughter symbolizes the birth of the new order, the new nation has already been born. In the beginning he is not committed but later in the end he is politically and personally connected and committed to his family, his lover and his daughter which he still not aware of. The explosion has made it possible for Neil to identify himself of what he is, the barometer was really rising and with the explosion there was death and rebirth of Neil and Canada it self.

Neil macrae is fighting for the right to have his identity without oppression and to express it freely. Neil macrae comes to Alex Mackenzie who he is depending on to clear his name of a military charge of insubordination. The way he finds support from Alex is worth noting. Alex says, “I do not understand very much, but I always have known what it is I have to do next, and if I lose the job at Wain’s there will be another one somewhere else. We are told the lord will provide, and there would be no use whatever in going to church if a man cannot believe a thing as early as that.” (Pg227) Neil’s biggest strength was Alex and his defense rests on the exact words of colonel Wain’s order. He was obsessed by the desire to justify himself entirely to the critical situation which was created by the explosion. At this point when the barometer is rising for him he shows his endurance, and his ability to command “On his way back to the north end Neil tried to plan a way in which he could be of most effective use. He was stopped by a section of soldiers who wanted to commander his truck, and there was much argument before he convinced the sergeant in charge of the party that he was himself an officer and had no intention of yielding it. After five minutes of bluff and minor intimidation, Neil had his way and drove off with a dozen men piled in behind him.”(pg292)

He is blown up, ironically, as Halifax is blown up. Both are blown up as part of the war which they are not responsible for. Neil macrae says, “ no matter what the Canadians did over there, they were not living out the sociological results of their own lives when they crawled through the trenches of France. The war might be Canada’s catastrophe, but it was not her tragedy.”(pg330)

Neil represents the new Canada. He asserts his belonging to Halifax. The return to the city initiates an emotional consciousness of what it meant to be Canadian. Even though he is physically exhausted, lacks home, even lacks his own identity but the return is to transform his life and this is what Neil represents in the novel. He is the new Canada or the youth of Canada who is attempting to assert its independence of the ties which bound its elders for so long to a colonial mentality. He is trying to reclaim the privilege of being a Canadian citizen. He fully realized what being a Canadian meant, when Neil says, “this anomalous land, this sprawling waste of timber and rock and water where the only living sound were the footfalls of animals or the fantastic laughter of a loon, this empty tract of primordial silences and winds and erosions and shifting colors, this beadlike string of crude towns and cities tied by nothing but railway tracks, this nation undiscovered by the rest of the world and unknown to itself, these people neither American nor English, nor even sure what they wanted to be, this unborn mightiness…”(.pg132). The comparison of towns and cities to beads with the railway as the string suggests both the value of the individual parts of Canada and the vulnerability of the bond between them. In the beginning Neil appears rooted in realist conventions; a nervous man, insolvent who carries “himself without confidence” (pg4). There is an aesthetic symmetry between Neil and Halifax. The author’s description between them is very similar and both are betrayed. He lived in exile as an anonymous soul on the edge of despair. But he is later in a positive light as he attempts to disrupt and destroy all the aspects of the conventional society in order to reclaim his sense of self.

He is transformed from a desolate wanderer lacking intimate connections with others to a man reunited with his native community and his family. Even, as the city is subjected to the most spectacular transformation, as most of its buildings are razed by the Halifax explosion, landscapes, societies and individuals. This change has brought happiness together for Neil, Penny and Jean. For Neil, as well as Canada there is an image for a sudden jolt of self-knowledge with the explosion.

To Neil McCrae, the novels protagonist, it is a terrible desecration of civilization. He is shell shocked and disoriented. The explosion has blasted into new relationships with Britain and Canada, which is no longer colonial, but non-committal as Neil describes it, “if there were enough Canadians like himself then the day was inevitable when the halves would join and his country would become the central arch which united the new order”. (Pg359)