The Hermit and the Old Goat

Abstract

Narrated by a man looking back at his childhood, The Hermit and the Old Goat is loosely connected to real events. Placing herself in this fictional character’s mind allowed the author to explore with distant compassion the results of a traumatic family split. In self-narrative, we can re-script a traumatic experience’s meaning without having to depict it exactly as it happened. The trauma of losing one’s family disrupts one’s sense of self, one’s connection to the past and present and even the future. The Hermit and the Old Goat explores such trauma and its aftereffects from the reflective view of an outsider and his community. Such narrative distance in time, character, and even gender allows for an expression of forgiveness, understanding, and healing.

Family Feuds Are Forever

“…Bakhtin's "Eloquent I" 1 helps us remove ourselves from solipsistic retellingswe find shared consciousness and experience when pulling away from I the storyteller-we unvictimize ourselves as we retell our stories. In the stories I have written over a family's demise (or at least from my perspective-the family is still intact just without me and my husband), I have worked with third-person voice to help me avoid a victim's perspective (Giorgio, 2008(Giorgio, , 2010a(Giorgio, , 2010b. Such writing has allowed me to get into the heads of my detractors to try to understand their motivations and present those motivations as legitimate and understandable.…”