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Tori’s comment just before class ended got me thinking about the significance of metaphor in first person descriptions of disability; especially when the descriptions are written to an able-bodied audience, metaphor becomes the best or only way to illustrate an experience of disability. I started thinking more about some of the metaphors that Aron Ralston used throughout his memoirs and video interviews because they had implied some of his attitudes about what happened and his life now that he did not say explicitly–in fact, he avoided mentioning his experience of everyday life without a hand while hastily telling audiences that he has a girlfriend, gives motivational speeches to schoolchildren, and continues to climb only better than ever. Snyder and Mitchell point out that “[i]f the body is the Other of the text, then textual representation seeks access to that which it is least able to grasp” (64). I think, that Ralston’s metaphors are good clues to his conflicted, and perhaps, due to social pressures, inarticulable, feelings about his loss.
For example, Ralston calls the slot canyon where he lost his hand a “gash in the earth’s surface.” I thought this diction suggests that this setting is a violent place. He goes into the gash, the place of violence where he later becomes a self-amputee. This is a place that is already marked for him as a deep cut into a body of sorts. A place caused by violence that carries out violence against his body, requiring him later to enact further violence on himself in order to survive. In other comments about the canyon setting, he describes nature as benevolent, having given him the chance to live through the incident. But I gathered that his negatively-charged descriptions of the canyon itself denote an attitude toward it that is conflicted. Maybe it’s just foreshadowing, but it seems also to be a way of getting at his real experience of the ordeal.
Later, in his brief comments of what it’s like to be alive after the life-threatening experience, he says, “It’s like when your grandmother gives you a sweater for Christmas; you feel a lot of pressure to wear it.” So basically, he’s been given this gift of a life he doesn’t want, but feels obligated to make use of this life so as not to disappoint others. It’s understandable, I suppose, to imply that the life he has now is perhaps not one he would have chosen for himself, much like a Christmas sweater that’s just not “you,” but I think that this metaphor really showed the pressure he was feeling to make his life especially meaningful or noteworthy now that his previous trajectory for making his life worthwhile has been interrupted by amputation.
Those were the two I could think of…apart from when he pokes his crushed hand with a knife and says it slid right in like the hand was warm butter. Yikes. As noted by Snyder and Mitchell, “disability also serves as a metaphorical signifier of social and individual collapse,” and I think this is the case for Ralston (47). I’m convinced these metaphors are something to pay attention to.
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