End of the Old Horse, Essay Example

Simon J. Ortiz’s story End of the Old Horse encompasses various aspects of humanity, namely that of family, and growing up. The article depicts scenarios where cultural and human relations intertwine. The article also focuses on the pathos of the human condition through character development. The author aims, and achieves a rendition of the American family and how that family lives their lives from day, and the struggles that bring them down, and the unwavering human spirit that brings them back up again.

The article begins with two siblings go out in an ordinary day when their dad is not around. The siblings go on an adventure feeding trout. Unfortunately the siblings do not succeed in catching any fish but all the same they have a good time going about their adventure and trying to feed fish. The reader is able to derive how these two siblings interact with one another, and judge this interaction and how it helps form an idea on the siblings’ home life. That is, that their mother is strict and their father is lenient and covers for them but that the siblings live in a loving and caring home. The siblings engage in playful acts like outdoing each other in running, trying to feed fish, and other physical feats. The narrator is also keen to note the kind of language that they use while young. Gilly is fond of cuss words that the narrator also uses. The use of cuss words shows that the two siblings are mischievous and also that they want to use adult words because they think it will make them feel like adults: their dad, however, gets irritated by such language as shown later in the story while they are having their meal. The shows that the father wants his kids to have a better vocabulary and that he does care about them because cuss words are a lazy way to express oneself.

It is also worth noting the closeness that Americans have to animals. The two siblings go looking for trout. The narrator and Gilly use cans that they have been taught how to use. This insinuates that elder people of their tribe have affection for the fish and thus teaching their young ones on how to take care of them is an extension of the tribe’s traditions. The dog (Old Horse) in the story creates a situation that saddens everyone who hears of its death. Gillys sobs and cries after he gets the news of the horse’s death. Efforts to calm him down by the narrator fail. Their father stops his story telling session after hearing of its death. He even is oblivious of the poor language that Gilly uses at this point in the story.

Information and educational styles are also evident from the article. The young ones use innovative methods to trap fish that they have learnt from their tribe’s elders. The narrator notes that their mom is fond of disrupting their dad’s regular stories. This is especially when the stories involve content that the siblings should not know, or content that is too adult for them. Eventually the siblings are able to acquire the information insinuating that there are other sources from which children learn about life apart from their parents. The author also tackles gender issues in the story. There are those things that the father is ready to share with his children but the mother is against the idea, meaning that the mother believes her children aren’t ready to be exposed to such stories but the father believes it’s time for them to learn more about life and the other side of things that aren’t always pleasant. The siblings are also educated on hygiene. Gilly struggles to clean his denim because he knows what to expect from his dad. This hygiene lesson could also translate to the care for the environment and natural resources. The story is full of such parallelism from the horse being symbolic to how the siblings need to grow up and learn about death, to how the siblings have to catch trout in order to help support the family because when a person is part of a family, they are a small part of the whole and the whole doesn’t work unless everyone is pulling their own weight. That’s why tradition is so important in the story: without tradition, the siblings wouldn’t know their way of life, and how to pass along information to their children when they have any.