55 pages • 1 hour read
Ivan DoigThe Whistling Season
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Seizing All Opportunities for Education
As Paul, now in his 60s, travels to meet with a “convocation of delegates from the rural school system” in Great Falls, he finds himself thinking back to a very different learning event that occurred when he was 13, “where Rose stepped down from the train, bringing several kinds of education to the waiting four of us” (29). The graduate of a one-room school, the adult Paul values the more individualized and spontaneous education that he received from Morrie—an education in which any setting and situation could produce knowledge—over the more regimented and impersonal setting of larger, age-stratified schools. Remembering the day the well-educated Morrie took over the Marias Coulee school, Paul revels in the classroom learning that inspired him. In addition to usual courses in arithmetic, reading, and penmanship, Morrie offers practical instruction in meteorology and astronomy. Morrie also focuses on individual students, devoting extra time to teaching Paul Latin and coming up with a way to convince Eddie to wear reading glasses that will not wound his pride.
Beyond the classroom, the Milliron boys receive an education in human behavior. They find Rose, unlike any person they have ever known. Entering their lives like a gentle but irresistible force of nature, she transforms their home with her new routines and pleasant but intractable disposition. Unafraid to ask for the things she wants, Rose gets the better of Oliver, Paul, and the others every time she seeks to negotiate something with them. Morrie proves also to be a unique, person who engages with everyone in the family: discussing the finer points of the nicknames of boxing with Damon, the risky nature of dryland farming with Oliver, or drawing Paul out with philosophical discussions about fights and punishment. Unexpected crises during the year enhance Paul’s ability to handle conflicts and emergencies, such as when he must saddle a horse and ride to find a doctor for Toby’s crushed foot. Paul’s experiences are difficult and sometimes frightening, but they are full of educational promise.
Having expressed the value of a good education, the author also reveals the consequences of eschewing it. Morrie’s final confrontation with Brose—who has already withdrawn his son from school—puts formal education in direct conflict with older superstitions. Brose connects Halley’s comet to the disruptive drought of 1910 and blames Morrie for bringing the comet and calamity. Eddie saves Morrie’s life when he recalls one of his lessons: that this comet returns every 75 years and it has absolutely no bearing on anything happening on the earth. Reflecting on the danger resulting from Brose’s ignorance, the adult Paul compares it to the ignorance of his state appropriations chairperson, who sees in the Sputnik satellite the portent of danger for American public education.
The Tension Between Destiny and Chance
From the first few days of her presence in Montana, Rose muses aloud on the topic of destiny and parsing out the role fate played in bringing her to Marias Coulee. For his part, Paul is quietly skeptical. Since the untimely death of his mother, he has doubted the existence of any guiding hand behind human events. Morrie, whom Rose assumes to be another beneficiary of destiny, responds cynically to the topic, telling Oliver that the teaching job he stumbled into and excels at—almost as if fated—is actually just a preventative from “the acid of boredom” (222). Along with the notion that fate has brought her and her brother to Marias Coulee, Rose speaks often about “perdition.” Perdition classically means eternal damnation, though as used in this narrative, it refers to ongoing punishment for past misdeeds. Morrie, after spending days cutting and recutting firewood for Aunt Eunice, seems renewed by what he views as destiny’s correction. As events unfold that allow Rose to make material gains for herself, she comes to believe that destiny has taken her side. Thus, she embraces fully the opportunity to become a Montana landowning homesteader. As the narrative progresses, serendipity begins to rule the Millirons’ perspective: their house becomes a tranquil, clean sanctuary; the boys’ school transforms into a place of challenging, enjoyable learning; Paul’s educational achievements enable him to become the private Latin student of his appreciative teacher; and the entire community gathers at the newly state-approved school to witness a comet presentation that can only happen once every 75 years. Oliver falls in love with Rose who is only too happy to accept his proposal of matrimony.
However, if so-called “destiny” brought Rose and Morrie to the Millirons, it must also be blamed for Rose’s slip of the tongue that allows Paul and Damon to deduce her identity and potentially threaten her happiness. When the brothers discover that Rose is the widow of a disgraced boxer, Casper Llewellyn, killed by gamblers who probably want to harm her as well, they find themselves placed in a position of deciding who to tell and why. Here, fate comes down to the actions of a 12- and a 13-year-old boy. When Paul further realizes that Morrie is actually Morgan Llewellyn, not Rose’s sister but the boxer’s brother and fight manager and a participant in the scheme that got Casper killed, he realizes that the fates of his family, himself, Rose, and Morrie now intertwine, and he has a say in how things will work out. He describes himself as a “tenant of the moment, with the night-heightened destinies and fates of everyone I knew swirling around whatever my own were” (240). The reflection, while certainly precocious for a young teenager, alludes to a burgeoning authorial consciousness and to the overall narrative conceit.
Indeed, if the young Paul feels that chance and human intention are the drivers of life events, his adult self knows how these stories turn out. In retrospect, it all looks like destiny—or plot. As an adult, Paul can say he made the proper decision to keep the secrets of Rose and Morrie to himself, especially since his father and stepmother lived out their lives together happily. Traveling toward Great Falls, he lingers on linguistic lessons Morrie taught him, inspiring him such that he recognizes a way to spare all the rural small schools in Montana from closure. Seen in this light, destiny caused Morrie to accompany Rose, and then share with Paul an understanding about certain specific words that would allow him to safeguard the future of small public schools.
The Power of Secrets in the Community
Paul, now an adult and in charge of a large state government department, remembers his horse race against Eddie. The boys designed the race to settle the score for an insult Eddie made against Rose, with Paul punching him in response. As he recollects, the thing that amazes him was that all three dozen students in the school knew about it and attended the race but no parents found out:
And nobody blabbed. That was the incredible thing. I cannot say a word to anyone in my department without it ending up three floors away. But the school children of Marias Coulee kept as mum as the pillars of Delphi (51).
Unlike his adult co-workers, Paul’s schoolmates understand how to keep secrets. The children practice judicious concealment, and Paul likens them to the “pillars of Delphi,” an image that suggests both endurance through the ages and the famous opacity of the pronouncements of the Oracle. Throughout the novel, the children reinforce this perception. For fear his father might find out, the children keep secret the fact that Eddie wears reading glasses in class. To entertain their parents on Comet Night, the entire student body secretly learns to play the harmonica. Keeping confidences becomes a common theme running through the narrative, and Doig demonstrates how that can be a positive force in a community.
The author, however, gradually increases the significance of the secrets the characters must keep. Rose asks Paul not to tell his father that Morrie does not want her to buy Eunice’s house. Morrie swears the Milliron brothers to silence about Brose coming into the schoolhouse after class and threatening to beat the teacher. Rose swears Damon and Paul to keep the secret about her late husband throwing the boxing bout that resulted in his murder. After this, Morrie asks Paul to keep secret the fact that he is the dead man’s brother and manager.
When Oliver overhears Damon talking about Paul’s fistfight and horse race, he punishes Paul for a relatively unimportant infraction. As the storyline proceeds, however, the fallout from any broken promise of secrecy becomes much more significant. If Paul tells his father that Rose arrived on the run from Chicago gamblers, it might permanently color their relationship or even end it. The author uses the theme of kept confidences to reveal the inherent power of secrets. If someone asks an individual to keep a secret, a bonded connection arises, making the secret keeper in part responsible to and for the secret sharer. Doig wants his readers to understand that everyone has the right to refuse to keep a secret or to modify the ground rules under which someone keeps the secret safe.
Related Titles
By Ivan Doig
