I. Essay Title
A. Introduction
1. Opener: Pope? Wordsworth? Duncan? Thoreau? Emerson? DO NOT USE THE INTERNET!
2. Bridge Sentences with major events of the novel:
3. Thesis and Embedded Plan: While Gus was once an irreverent, self-absorbed, pessimistic young man, he evolves to become a spiritual, loving, and hopeful young man. Gus makes this transformation by seeing moments in his life as spiritual signs, finding love in his life, and accepting his mortality by living a life of significance.
B. Body Paragraph 1: Gus non native on spirituality
1. Who was this God of nature? Why hadn’t I met Him, or at least learned something substantial about Him, or at the very least heard His name consistently taken in some way other than in vain? Why-when I had fished the fresh and saline waters of…had I failed to even hear of this Illimitable King who created, fed and ruled them all?
(Duncan 37).
a. Context: Gus, H20, and MA read Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler -a book about the god of nature more than fishing. This bothers Gus since he has fished everywhere and not seen God.
b. Condense: Gus explains that he has fished in hundreds of places, for many different kinds of fish, yet he has never met this “God of nature.”
c. Concepts: A non-native is " a person who views nature from an anthropocentric lens and who does not learn from nature nor the people within his or her community. A person without faith in himself nor the world. A non-native rejects his family, companionship, society, and faith / spirituality." (Huss "Gus Paper question"). Gus is a non-native for he too quickly dismisses a divine presence in the world, ignores the many transcendent moments he has had while fishing, and is faithless. This forces Gus to be irreverent toward faith and this leads to his existential despair.
d. Connect: Gus's immature view on the idea of God; "why hadn’t I met him,” (referring to the God of nature) shows that Gus does not realize that God can exist without being tangible. Gus is a "non-native" at this moment because he "does not learn from nature nor the people within his community. He is a person without faith in himself nor the world. A non-native rejects his family, companionship, society, and faith / spirituality." (Huss "Gus Paper Question").He must develop a faith in the intangible to become native. He needs "to learn from nature nor the people within his or her community. "
C. Body Paragraph 2: Gus spiritual native
1. Titus says to Gus: " How can you be sagacious and patient in seeking fish and so hasty and thick as to write off your soul because you can't see it?" and then Gus realizes: "I felt the one called Nameless was trying to speak to me- -had long been trying. And his words were silent
spoken in images: pine knot, why in the river, old Thomas, Eddy...these were the signposts marking my inner and outer journey...unlooked for, unasked for...I had to follow the signs I was given." (Duncan 178, 234-235).
a. context: After Gus rejected a tangible God, he has discovered a dead body and overcome his fear of death, lived an ideal schedule of 14 and 1/2 hours of fishing a day, rejected it, fell in love with Eddy, was rejected by her, and has philosophized with Titus about God.
b. condense: Titus informs Gus that recalling Bill Bob's Garden World and developing faith in an afterlife, becoming an active environmentalist, and
finding Eddy and love are the signposts marking his journey toward fatih. Gus learns that Divine Providence works through signs.
c. Concepts: This is a matured Gus for he perceives a divine presence in the world in people, moments, stories. . .develops a faith that God speaks through subtle signs in people and moments. Gus perceives that he has been given "unlooked for help." "Unlooked for help" is defined as "assistance provided a person who is faithless, frustrated, angry, and cynical to save them from his or her despair and move them toward faith in the self and the world." (Huss "Gus Paper Question").
d. Connect: Gus becomes spiritual once he realizes that the "unlooked for help" he is given in the form of experiences, epiphanies, and people were "unasked for" and, arguably, undeserved because the more immature Gus was so quick to dismiss God. Gus becomes a native by becoming a "person who has faith in himself and the world, a loving, and spiritual person." (Huss "Gus Paper Question"). He cannot avoid reading the signposts and having faith in them as divinely given.
e. Emerson quote: "Trust Thyself...accept the place the Divine Providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events." (Emerson 192)
Connect: In "Self Reliance," Emerson is arguing that to have faith in one's self and one's world and one's God, one must accept that "contemporaries" and "events" in one's life are meant to happen and caused by a divine mind.
f. Compare and Contrast: Similar to the way Gus perceives that Bill Bob, Titus, and Eddy are mentors meant to guide him to self realization, Emerson argues that we must trust that the seeming randomness of who are our contemporaries and the seeming randomness of our life events are not random, but a manifestation of a divine mind. Unlike Emerson who concludes with confidence that nature, people, and events are "the universal spirit speaking to the individual," Gus once doubted this order in the world and rejected the world and life as capricious and meaningless. In the end, Gus becomes a native like Emerson, for both know that "in the end, it all depends on how you look at things." (Duncan 401). As a faithful, native adult, Gus rejects his former self who once doubted and denied the ability to know God; he knows of the world's failings but still has faith in God' presence in the world to direct him.