Crazy Ivar example essay topic

PAPER #1: O PIONEERS In Willa Cather's novel, O Pioneers, she tells the story of lives that were played out in the early part of American history. She created a character that was odd by nature, but brought an abundance of life to the novel. His name was Ivar, but was referred to, by many, as "Crazy Ivar". Ivar was a deeply religious and slightly imbalanced elderly man. He had no faith in the civilization he was living in and behaved peculiarly around the people who lived there.

He had an intrinsic understanding of nature and animals and thus became Alexandra's devoted servant. Ivar was a complex character who was a disheveled, non-conformist, who lived a life outside the norm. Was he a simply a perplex man or was he, in fact, crazy? We first learn of Ivar in Part I. Six months after the death of Alexandra's father, her and her two brothers took an outing to the nearby cave-home of Ivar. This is where we find our first contradiction.

Ivar was an elderly man, who never wore shoes nor shaved. By the standards of the society he lived in, he was not a "clean shaven" man, yet he had an immaculate home. In Part I, he was described as. ".. a queerly shaped old man, with a thick, powerful body set on short bow-legs. His shaggy white hair, falling in a thick mane about his ruddy cheeks, made him look older than he was". It was apparent that he did not care too much about the way that he looked. He looked older than he was because of his lack of self-grooming.

Although he may not have been a clean-shaven man, his house was far from dirty. The road leading to Ivar's house was home was desolate and poor. Only the Russians who crammed families in long houses lived out where Ivar lived. Cather described the road to his home to be fitting of his character when she explained it as, "rather short-sighted of him to live in the most inaccessible place he could find". Though the road was muddled, his home was anything but. His home was eloquently described in Part I: At one end of the pond was an earthen dam, planted with green willow bushes, and above it a door and a single window were set into the hillside.

You would not have seen them at all but for the reflection of the sunlight upon the four panes of window-glass. And that was all you saw. Not a shed, not a corral, not a well, not even a path broken in the curly grass. But for the piece of rusty stovepipe sticking up through the sod, you could have walked over the roof of Ivar's dwelling without dreaming that you were near a human habitation.

Ivar had lived for three years in the clay bank, without defiling the face of nature any more than the coyote that had lived there before him had done. That was just the outside of the dwelling. Ivar found solace in living where he did. He felt as if houses were much dirtier than his hut. He referred to "the broken food, the bits of broken china, the old wash-boilers and tea-kettles thrown into the sunflower patch" as descriptors to why he felt the way he did on the messiness of humans. You would never find any of that in his home.

Ivar preferred to be neat and orderly, "he preferred the cleanness and tidiness of the wild sod". He thought the badgers were cleaner than humans. Ironic that a man so outwardly unshaven, could live in such an immaculate home. That is just it... it made him ironic... not crazy. Another way that Ivar was misunderstood was because of his spirituality.

He was a very religious man, yet he never went to church. Ivar read the Bible religiously. He would read to who ever else would listen. In Part I, we learn that he. ".. always put on a clean shirt when Sunday morning came round, though he never went to church. He had a peculiar religion of his own and could not get on with any of the denominations". He was not one for going to church, yet he found his spirituality to be a pillar in his life.

In the evenings, before he would retire for the night, he would make hammocks with twine, while committing "chapters of the Bible to memory". In Chapter II, Part II, we learn that Ivar has moved in with Alexandra and lives in her barn. He is still a spiritual man and reads the Bible to Alexandra. And at night, he would "say his prayers at great length behind the stove... and go out to his room in the barn".

He never found himself wanting to go to church. As described in Part I, although he was religious, he never found a denomination that he agreed with. The people, who lived in the same town as he, used that as evidence to prove that he was crazy. Finally, another point that got the townspeople talking was the fact that Ivar was so good with animals, yet he lost his own farm. When Alexandra was on her way to see him for one of the first times, she recalled the story of " the Berquist's cow when she had torn it loose and went crazy. She was tearing all over the place, knocking herself against things.

And at last she ran out on the roof of the old dugout and her legs went through and there she stuck, bellowing. Ivar came running with his white bag, and the moment he got to her she was quiet and let him saw her horn off and daub the place with tar". She knew that he "understands animals". That was a gift of his.

Unfortunately towards the end of the novel, we find out that he now lives with Alexandra on her ranch because he lost his own farm years ago due to mismanagement. In conclusion, Ivar was a religious, solitary, and strange man. But in my opinion, he was not crazy. He is just misunderstood. It was Alexandra who listened carefully to him and could see who he really was: a caring, sensitive, spiritual individual. She had that notion to begin with.

In the beginning of the novel, she even said, "some days his mind is cloudy, like. But if you can get him on a clear day, you can learn a great deal from him". And that, she did... from learning how to care for the pigs, to learning the importance in friendship. Maybe by the standards of the time he was living in, he might have been seen as crazy because he was a non-conformist... but to the people that knew him and saw him for who he really was, they knew that he was far from crazy.

He was just himself... a wise man.