The first word I looked at is “wheel”. Sam’s narrative uses the word six times and Halie’s narrative uses the word nine times. Some instances of the word are mirrored in the narratives, but at times the mirrored line is unrelated. Each narrative has one instance where they use the word as an action. “Mockingbirds & Buntings wheel off.” and “the slaughter we allways wheel past.” for Sam and Halie respectively. These uses of “wheel” don’t seem to be part of the motif as the mirror line for the others narrative does not use the word. The word is just used to reinforce the circular theme thorough the book.

 

The second word I looked at is “die”. Sam’s narrative uses the word seven times and Halie’s narrative uses the word three times. The reason that Halie’s narrative has less occurrences of the word is that she tends to use euphemisms for “die” like “go”. She also describes what happened to cause the death but never explicitly says the word like “Even if hacked Chestnut Sproutsx lie strewn upon” where Sam uses this wording “Even if hacked Virginia Opposums die stacked upon.” I am not sure why Halie uses the word less, possibly because men tend to be more aggressive than women and thus would be more comfortable with the word.

 

The last word group I looked at was “Bee” or a word containing “Bee” that still retained the insect definition. Both Halie’s and Sam’s narratives use the word ten times. Generally there is a counterpart to the word in the others narrative, but not always. Sometimes when there is a mismatch, one party will talk about bees and the other will use a word like “Hive”. It makes sense that the number of occurrences is matched in the two narratives because of their prominent place in the themes of the book. The dichotomy of needing honey to survive, but being deathly allergic to bees is an interesting one, relying on the thing that can kill you for life.

 

I used vizor to gather my data. Searching for terms and trying to preserve the symmetry by also searching for synonyms was very difficult. Trying to keep track of all of the synonyms, search terms, and occurrences of a word was interesting. If I had more free time I could see myself getting caught up in trying to find patterns in the book.