Brian’s Transformation in Who Has Seen the Wind

In short, the series of changes Brian Sean O’Connal experiences during Who Has Seen the Wind can be compiled into one big idea called “growing up”. What is growing up, is it conforming to the world around you and not asking questions? Or is it becoming a more mature person? In Who Has Seen the Wind, Brian grows and becomes more mature in some ways.

 

The book starts out very confusingly, which may be so because of how “undeveloped” Brian’s mind is. (But who’s to say what’s developed or not). He wonders and thinks about everything that flows through his mind. I think the thoughts of the young Brian were extrapolated by W.O. Mitchell’s wild imagination. It’s not that we don’t all have thoughts like the young Brian did, as we get older I think we just have to be more conscious to keep our mind open, but thoughts are still constantly flowing through your mind. To quote the book:

 

“Yep – ain’t ever empty – always thoughts into a fella’s head.”

“Not always,” Fat said.

“Jist try an’ not have any” Joe invited him.

 

The ways in which our awesome discussion group noticed that Brian was growing up was in how he was asking fewer questions as he grew older. You didn’t get as much of an in-depth view into his mind compared to when he was littler. I think I could safely say his imagination had been tamed a bit, for better and worse, maybe thinking more than imagining, since there was less obvious things to imagine.

 

When Brian was a child, he was a diamond in the rough per say. He wondered about the core of his being! He picked up ideas around from around him, for example the concept of god. Brian didn’t want god to be a large man who had an iron fist and caused suffering to whoever broke these rigid laws as told in church! Rather, he thought that he was a little prairie man in white boots that ate porridge!

 

In the latter half of the book he stopped wondering about things like that to some extent. I think he also became a more mature human being. He wondered less about great thoughts like god with white boots, and more about relationships he had with people, and things he could see. For example, the Ben, Uncle Sean and his Grandmother. Even if he may have stopped wondering about some subjects, he never lost his love of the prairie’s peaceful, ambiguous and wild nature.

 

I think we can all relate to wanting to feel something. The feeling that Brian continuously longed for was a combination of many things. It came up whenever something dramatic happened, like the death of his dog and the mutant cow. It also happened when his mind focused in on something with great beauty, like the dewdrop on the plant. It occured whenever he became really close to the world around him, or other living beings and how quickly things can change (death) with Brian having no control over it, close to god in my opinion. The key factor about the feeling was that Brian had no control over it! He kept longing for it but in the end only got it when he never would’ve expected it, which really says something.

 

I think that the feeling was a mixture of realization, grief, and something that touched Brian deep down inside.

 

Brian was quite close to the reality of birth and death as the novel painfully describes. In the end, he reflects on how much death he has experienced, so that’s also one of the things that were part of the transformation. This makes sense because when you lose someone that’s close to you, it challenges your view on reality since a part of you has been taken away. You have to make up for the empty space that would be left, and that would be quite the transformative experience.

 

Brian experiences the death of the baby pigeon, his dog, his dad, and his grandmother. The reason these things were so significant was how much he loved them all! He loved them all because he was searching for meaning in his life, trying to connect to the world around him in the best way he could. And when Brian placed his faith in those things, it in a sense became a part of him. From the unborn pigeon to his dad, losing those beings affected him in a pretty substantial way.

 

On the flipside he also was connected to birth. One of the reasons that Brian may have stopped wondering about god was when he found out how people are born, just like rabbits. I think death played a bigger part in his life than birth, although they are closely related.

 

wind     P   Pronunciation Key  (wnd)

n.

0.                  Moving air, especially a natural and perceptible movement of air parallel to or along the ground.

0.                  A movement of air generated artificially, as by bellows or a fan.

0.                  The direction from which a movement of air comes: The wind is north-northwest.

A movement of air coming from one of the four cardinal points of the compass: the four winds.

 

The definition of “wind” seems to mention movement quite a bit, which makes sense because essentially that’s what it is. The wind would be used as a metaphor for change, in fact it often is. Who Has Seen the Wind proves just how rich and meaningful the prairies are.

 

It’s awesome! I’ve seen some diagrams of the roots of prairie grass and it goes a few meters deep! They’ve grown strong over thousands of years, and thus they survive. During the book, Brian is trying to grow roots (find meaning), and the wind is a part of this. The winds of change are unpredictable, some examples being the deaths Brian experiences, and just the billions of changes in the incredibly descriptive nature of the book.

 

The prairie and the wind are tight friends. If they separated they just wouldn’t be the same, and greatly suffer. The prairie is like the wind’s brother. The prairie is the grass with the deep roots, the animals, the humanity contained on it and so on. I would think growing up on a farm would be quite a different experience than growing up in a city. In comparison to nature and the world and reality, we’re quite a small part of that. Brian was able to tap into this huge mystical world of the prairies and he grew quite strong from that. I think that’s one of the main reasons he became whom he ended up as in this ambiguous, poetic and complex novel.