The Rug Poem Analysis

The depiction of setting in the Prologue entitled “The Rug”, conveys David’s utmost alienation from the world around him, on this final day of his life. The novel opens with David Canaan looking out the “kitchen window” (3) at the harsh winter landscape of Entremont - his hometown where he has lived for “all his thirty years” (3). The community’s name, Entremont is French for “between the mountains”, alluding to the novel’s title and structure and conveying David's imprisonment. Furthermore, the adjective “all” indicates that David has been trapped in Entremont his whole life. The symbolism of staring out a glass window further strengthens this sense of entrapment as he is limited, in this scene, to observing but not taking part in the world
Buckler’s depiction of the deathly pale, wan colors of this bleak landscape enclose David’s world. The “sun that slanted, without warmth” (5) gives him no comfort even “from the bruised lids of the sky”(5). David is alone without even God to comfort him in his loneliness. The “bruised lids” here indicate that even God’s eyes are incapable of seeing his pain. The personified “twisted arms of the apple tree [...] looked locked and separated, as if all their life had fled its own nakedness ” (5). Winter has caused the trees to appear naked and lifeless, the branches are no longer united by green coverage but instead splayed and unmoving. Everything is rigidly frozen. Buckler’s stark imagery of a lifeless landscape during winter - the season of death - foreshadows David’s death. At the end of the prologue, he escapes the kitchen profoundly; it is only in the epilogue in which the story is brought back to him “standing at the window [...] watching the highway” (397), his last viewing of society before his literal isolated