Frank Norris's World of Turmoil in The Octopus: A Hermeneutical Reading

Asserted as an “epic novel” by Donald Pizer, Frank Norris’s The Octopus keeps absorbing critics’ attention for its portrayal of the conflicts between the ranchers and the railroad, the conversion of faith happening to the main characters, and the ending atmosphere of the novel, which obviously attempts to wind up in a benign and opti-mistic direction. This study is an effort to read Norris’s masterpiece mainly through Martin Heidegger’s viewpoints of the fourfold,--that of the Sky and the Earth, the Di-vinities and the Mortals. The fact is that Heidegger, in his later years, develops in his hermeneutical phenomenology the concept of the fourfold. For Heidegger, the world of the fourfold is a world of Being, a healthy one given from God. However, this world has been spoiled since man failed to fulfill his role as a sound mortal. Concern-ing this, Heidegger believes that hermeneutics, in a mythological sense, offers itself as a means for interpretation because it, as Heidegger emphasizes in On the Way to Lan-guage, bears in itself the “tidings,” or, the “message” from Being, or God (29). In this study, I shall focus on analyzing how man ignores nature and its law, how the earth is exploited on account of man’s pride and avarice, and how man can possibly find a way out for the world as well as for himself, by taking up his role again as a member of the fourfold--to be the world’s preserver, rather than its brutal demolisher.