No Renewal By Dougl Summary

I believe that the theme of no renewal is that human progress is bad and that we often don’t think about the consequences of our actions this is clearly stated in the story because the main character discusses how the world went down hill and how humans are pushing the world's sustainability to the limit. He also talks about how humans stop farming and now most of the world relies on synthetical food while he is one of the only people who still grow their crops. In he calls the area around him a wasteland because all the clay was mined out and the only things left around him are empty mining pits and swarming apartments. At the end of the story he also gets a knock at the door after he reads his birth certificate and finds that he is supposed
to be euthanized today this helps demonstrate the theme because the author tries to prove that human progress caused the world to change from the environmental pardies filled with farms and green field to a depleted wasteland where people live in cramped apartments and he demonstrated that successfully by creating a lonely isolated character who outlive all his friends and family in order to talk about his experiences during his childhood and how he doesn’t enjoy the modern day ways of life and how he thinks that society caused this.
Introduction: the introduction introduces the main character douglas bent jr and describes him as an old man without any living relatives living in one of the last farms in nova scotia. And describes the setting around him such as his old house where he is making tea during his birthday with no one to celebrate. He describes the land around him as barren and striped of all its resources and packed with people living close together in tiny apartments Initiating conflict: the conflict becomes initiated when douglas bent starts discussing his life during the past and how he wishes it was still the same in the present this initiates the conflict where douglas explains why he lives in isolation and starts wondering about how old he
is. Rising action: the rising action starts when he is debating how old he is and starts reflecting on his memory and looking at the calendar and not remembering his age. He is then trying to decide whether or not to check his age. Climax: the climax happens when he decided to go up to the attic and get his birth certificate so that he can find out his age the author also decides to foreshadow the story by mentioning that douglas bents father accepted euthanasia when he was 61 therefore the author was giving us a subtle hint that douglas bent was thinking about euthanasia Falling action: the falling action starts once douglas unlocks the chest in the attic and starts going through its contents and starts looking at pictures of his farm and thinking about how much the world has changed. Then he finds his birth certificate and as he reads it he finds out he is fifty he then foreshadows the resolution by saying that there’s something peculiar about that age. As he reads the last line he exclaims that he will be getting a birthday gift after all as he reads that today is his expiry date. Resolution: the resolution happens after he reads that his expiry date is today and hears a knock on the door meaning people have come to euthanize him. The central conflict of the story is man vs society because douglas bent refuses to accept the new ways of living and instead prefers to live in a farm and refuses to live in the city like the remaining members of his family this is clearly stated because he says that he misses the days when he was a child, when farming was more common and people still cared about the environment and everything they had wasn’t made from factories and that he doesn’t enjoy the way the world is right now and that plants are dying off and people aren’t growing their own food anymore and instead it is being made artificially he also talks about how he is one of the last people to own a farm or grow his own food which shows that he's rebelling the standards of the society he lives in. even though the central conflict is man vs society the story also shows a man vs self conflict because in the end when he finds his birth certificate which states that its his expiry date today he says that he’s getting a gift on his birthday after all meaning he is accepting euthanasia which means that he had an internal conflict which led him to decide that dying would be a mercy for him since he outlived all his friends and relatives but this could also link into the man vs society conflict since he is also tired of living in a society so dependent on machines which would have made him more accepting towards euthanasia.
The author created a very sad and depressing tone for this story by utilising a character who has decided to go against the standards of his society and reside alone from everyone trying to preserve his family's farming legacy while living in on a mountains surrounded by empty mines and swarming houses this sets a gloomy atmosphere because the author conveys a warning of what would happen if we were to continue progressing without considering the impacts on the environment.
It evokes a sad mood because it makes the reader wonder about what damage humans have already caused to the environment and infer what will happen to the environment in the future if we keep using fossil fuels and not creating sustainable ways of life. The author was very successful in using plot and setting to demonstrate his theme but he wasn’t as successful in using conflict because it was hard to understand what the conflict itself was because at the start it went from a man vs self conflict to a man vs society conflict which makes it hard to use the conflict to establish the theme. But the author did a good job with the setting because it demonstrates the drastic change from the past to the present showing us the ruined wasteland in the present and making us think about what could have caused it to become like that meanwhile the plot explains how the
main character is wishing that the world would go back to what it used to be and how he does not wish to live like the people during his present and instead decides to reside in desolation and grow his own food. This conveys the theme by using the main character to tell us what progress can do if humans aren't aware of the consequences