56 pages • 1 hour read
Annette Saunooke ClapsaddleEven As We Breathe
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Setting
There are three places that are key to the development of the story. The first of these is Lishie’s cabin—Cowney’s home. The cabin is the site of Lishie’s interactions with her grandson in which she imparts her faith, compassion, and wisdom, as well as sharing the all-important stories of Cowney’s parents. In the cabin, Cowney says his final goodbyes to Lishie and greets people at her wake. There he meets the stranger from his father’s past who will become his savior. He retreats to the cabin to await the news of the investigation into the disappearance of the missing child. Given all the turbulence he experiences at the cabin, Cowney has mixed emotions upon learning that the forest fire did not consume it.
A second key setting is room 447 of the Grove Park Inn. Cowney is timorous about stepping foot inside at first. He goes with Essie to protect her and dissuade her from acting foolishly. Quickly, however, the room becomes a sanctuary that allows the two young people to experience friendship with one another and grow to know themselves. The sort of intimacy that develops between Cowney and Essie because of their time in the room, from Cowney’s perspective, is deeper than romantic love and perpetually lasting. It is only to save himself from false accusation that Cowney identifies the room as the place where he keeps the piece of bone he found earlier in the summer. Cowney knows that revealing the room compromises it, preventing Essie and him from using it again.
The final setting is the waterfall pool. His discovery of the pool is miraculous in the first instance given that Cowney grew up close by, spent a great deal of time in the woods, yet never discovered the site. It is while chasing a wayward monkey Edgar that Cowney stumbles onto the natural setting. As noted above, his first experience at the pool is a spiritual awakening. Each time he returns, Cowney experiences renewal and healing—something he also sees happen to a large, injured black bear. When he brings Essie to the pool, they swim together and find themselves and their relationship restored. When the succor of the cabin dies with Lishie and the military corrupts room 447, only the waterfall pool remains as a seemingly eternal place of nurture and renewal.
Coming of Age
Even As We Breathe is a coming-of-age story that describes a pivotal summer in the lives of a young man and a young woman. As his story begins, Cowney is socially awkward, terribly insecure, and completely uncertain about his future direction. All he knows is that he desires to leave the reservation at Cherokee. His summer job at the inn gives him a temporary respite from Uncle Bud’s dominance and enables him to earn money for his future. To his surprise, he strikes up a friendship with the beautiful girl who infatuates him. Speaking to her helps dispel his insecurities and awkwardness. The consecutive, significant challenges that arise for Cowney over the summer build his inner reliance while also revealing where he can turn for support. By the end of the narrative, Cowney reports that he has found his voice and, as well, his place. Though he will venture forth and gain the sought-after college experience, he will eventually return to Cherokee and make his home in the mountains to which he belongs.
The novel is also a coming-of-age story for Essie. For her, the housekeeping job at the inn allows her to encounter people from places distant from Cherokee. Like Cowney, she yearns to be free of the reservation. As much as she loves Cowney and enjoys the intimacy and growth of their time in room 447, she cannot allow her feelings for him to deter her from marrying a non-Cherokee man. Her plan seems to germinate when Andrea, the son of an Italian diplomat, pursues her romantically. When Andrea abandons her, Essie acknowledges her own naivety, apologizing to Cowney. Wiser from experience, Essie reveals her awareness that she must make her own way out of Cherokee but, also, that she will eventually return—out of love for her home and the truest possible love for Cowney. As the fulfillment of this commitment, her grandchild returns her body at the time of her death to lie in a plot adjoining Cowney’s burial site at the novel’s end, suggesting that Essie ultimately does—like Cowney—end up at peace with her identity.
Frequent Use of Irony
Clapsaddle uses irony frequently throughout the narrative. Some of the placements of ironic descriptions and comments are subtle and personal, while others focus on wider issues.
In an irony that impacts and endangers many lives, Jon tells Cowney that white soldiers in World War I would remove ammunition from the weapons of Indigenous American soldiers at night, fearing an attack. Ironically, on at least one occasion, enemy soldiers attacked the American unit at night. The Indigenous soldiers could not protect themselves and also could not help defend their white comrades. By disarming the Indigenous men, the white soldiers actually endangered themselves.
Clapsaddle touches upon another, even larger irony in the one passage describing captive Indigenous Americans awaiting removal to the Indian Nations Territory (now the state of Oklahoma). Tsa Tsi recalls his grandfather saying that he stopped taking food to the stockade where his relatives languished out of fear of capture and removal. He wanted to remain in the mountains, he said, where he could be free. Eventually, the federal government recognized those who remained as the Eastern Band. However, Clapsaddle’s narrative portrays the freedom they have there as being severely limited anyway. This raises the question as to whether the captives or the escapees enjoy greater freedom, or if American society is such that location for the Cherokees makes no difference in their treatment by American society.
