"The Hermit’s Story" and Visual Stimulation

Wanda Pothier-Hill¹

n Rick Bass’ "The Hermit’s Story," two couples come together on Thanksgiving Day to enjoy each other’s company and wait out the ice storm that has left those in the town, as well as those in the mountains, without power. The narrator looks from his friends’ warm, mountainside home, towards town and sees "a bowl of silence and darkness" instead of the usual glitter of light. Where other stories move readers with their narration and some with their fast moving plot, Rick Bass moves his readers with visual stimulation. Many colors weave through this story, but blue is the one that is brought up most often:

Blue creeping up fissures and cracks from the depths of several hundred feet; blue working its way up through the gleaming ribs of Ann’s buried dogs; blue trailing like smoke from the dogs’ empty eye sockets and nostrils – blue rising like smoke from chimneys until it reaches the surface and spreads laterally and becomes entombed, or trapped – but still alive, and smoky – within those moonstruck fields of ice. (Bass 1)

Here blue has evolved from a color to breath, life, smoke, and death. The blue moves through dogs, long since dead, as if they are still alive with breath in their lungs. Blue struggles and persists, creeping its way up through the cracks in the ice, never yielding to death, yet it is death. Blue is a tomb, a means of suffocation, but at the same time, blue is life. The characteristics of blue are both ironic and impressive. Many readers associate blue with sadness, cold, and some, ironically, are comforted by this color. When the sun is shining and the sky painted blue, all seems fine in the world. Rick Bass has found a way to merge the sadness of blue with the comfort of blue and create a more complex meaning for this color.

The visual stimulation in this story goes beyond simply using blue as a metaphor, but rather is extended by the characters’ surroundings and circumstance. As the narrator and his companions finish off a chocolate cake and their third bottle of wine, his friend Ann begins to tell a story within a story. The narrator tells us that Ann’s best job she ever worked was when she trained a pack of dogs for Gray Owl. Ann shows Gray Owl how to work the dogs, and Gray Owl takes in all that Ann says, but like the narrator’s present circumstance, Ann and Gray Owl become trapped within a storm. Gray Owl falls through a hole in the ice, only to find himself not in water, but rather within an empty lake. He and Ann, along with the dogs, take shelter and find themselves submerged within a frozen, empty lake. Among what would surely spell death for others (falling into a frozen lake) is life for Ann, Gray Owl, and creatures that live beneath a roof of ice. Small snipe flutter about, darting in and out of frozen cattails, and the damp, spongy soil gives off its own scent: "The air was a thing of its own–recognizable as air, and breathable, as such, but with a taste and odor; an essence, unlike any other air they’d ever breathed" (Bass 8).

As Gray Owl and Ann wander around beneath the ice, guided by a small torch, colors morph once again: "the orange blurrings of their wandering trail beneath the ice; and what would the sheet of lake-ice itself have looked like that night – throbbing with the ice-bound, subterranean blue and orange light of moon and fire?" (11). Here, colors are the fire and moon. They throb, giving off life, and blur, leaving a hazy trail in their wake as proof of their existence.

Finally, colors stimulate the mind by becoming a means in which to recall memory and formulate understanding:

Ann would never discuss such a thing, but I suspect that it, that one day and night, helped give her a model for what things were like for her dogs when they were hunting and when they went on point: how the world must have appeared to them when they were in that trance, that blue zone, where the odors of things wrote their images across the dogs’ hot brainpans. (14)

It is with Bass’ use of visual stimulation that the reader is able to gain access to what lies beneath the surface of Ann’s journey and the world in which she lives. In "The Hermit’s Story" colors are not merely beautiful, but they create, breathe, collapse and die, only to rise again.

Work Cited

Bass, Rick. "The Hermit’s Story." The Best American Short Stories 1999. Ed. Amy Tan. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999.

¹ Written for semester coursework with Rachel Pollack.