Well, I wrote this up yesterday before I went home, but apparently closed down my computer before it finished posting. My bad.<\/p>\n
Breathing: it’s simple, and it happens more or less automatically. With the Hammer strike, I would have thought that many of the characters would find good occasion to breathe, whether to calm themselves down, or clear their heads, or what have you. But the term “breathe” occurs only twice in the novel, and not in a helpful context. Hamner is “almost afraid to breathe” (LH 382) as he and Eileen search for the embankment leading up to the railroad tracks, while Delanty “tried to breathe” (LH 451) as he and several others raid a flooded supermarket filled with dead bodies. There is no use of the word in the novel as I would have imagined it be used. No one recommends to a panicking friend that he or she “just breathe” for a second, and no one, on passing through some near-miss disaster or in succeeding to make it one more day after Hammerfall, thinks to “breathe easy” for a while. The entire novel seems to be one long, bated, and fearful breath.<\/p>\n
The term “breathing” meanwhile occurs 9 times, but far more often than not it is associated with troubled breathing. Again its use stresses the atmosphere of strife resulting from the Hammer’s impact with Earth; yet, would it be a stretch to argue that it also conveys a sense of urgency? The lack of any time taken for a restful or relaxing breath reflects the busy chaos of the world after Hammerfall, where stopping to catch one’s breath could mean the difference between survival or death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well, I wrote this up yesterday before I went home, but apparently closed down my computer before it finished posting. My bad. Breathing: it’s simple, and it happens more or less automatically. With the Hammer strike, I would have thought that many of the characters would find good occasion to breathe, whether to calm themselves… Continue reading just breathe<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[34],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":350,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342\/revisions\/350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}