An Argumentative Essay on Traveling Through the Dark

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22 February 2017
An Argumentative Essay on Traveling Through the Dark
Most of the time in our lives, we are faced with heavy decisions that we have to make in order to keep us going. In cases when these decisions have a clear boundary between what is right and what is wrong, making an action is easy. However, what about those instances in our lives where we encounter a dilemma where both choices are right, but both of them are also wrong? In these cases, we definitely take our time in weighing the pros and consequences, but in the end we always tend to choose the ‘lesser evil’.
In the poem written by Stafford, it could be seen that he was facing a dilemma between pushing the doe into the canyon or saving the fawn. Of course, each of these decisions could potentially lead to a number of risks such as being hit by another car in the dark if he stays too long, endangering someone else’s life if he just leave the doe, or kill the fawn if he decides to throw the doe into the canyon. However, battling with this decision, it is noticeable that the narrator ended up pushing the doe into the river. While it could easily be argued that the title Travelling Through the Dark is an apt metaphor to those phases of our lives where are blinded and faced with difficulties, the main question is whether what the narrator did is based from “choosing the less evil or not?” However, before we advance this argument, the author of this paper believes that it would be best to have an insight on the context and background information of the text.
The piece of literature that we are using is a poem written by William Stafford, a professor at the Lewis and Clark College. It is a short poem entitled Traveling Through the Dark which is only around five stanzas long. The poem detailed how the narrator found a dead doe (female dear) lying on the road. Basically, the main gist of the short poem is the narrator battling through a series of hard decisions for a time, until he ended up pushing the dead body of the doe, and the live fawn inside it, to the river.
As written from the beginning of the poem, the narrator stated “It is usually best to roll them into the canyon” as he found the doe lying in the middle of the road. However, it is also noticeable how the phrase “It is usually” refers to a hindrance, an obstacle, or any factor that prevents the narrator from simpl...