The Theme of “in a Grove”
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The theme of “In a Grove” was that personality affects the perception of truth. With the addition of the frame story in “Rashomon”, the theme became distortion of reality, induced by different perceptions of truth, strips people into the basics of human thinking.
The format of “In a Grove” was just statements from the different people involved in the killing of the samurai and the violation of the woman. This format constructs an arena where the reader can ponder about the differences in the statements of the character. Being without any interceptions between statements, readers are lead to compare the accounts of the different characters. This just leads us to realize that the perception of truth depends upon who the perceiver is and his personality.
In the statement of the Tajomaru, he gave emphasis on how he was able to trick the couple into following him in the forest. While in the statement of the Masago, she focused on how she ran and pleaded with her husband. Lastly, the samurai, Takehiko, talked most about his wife being the cause of his death. All of these events ran constant in all of the statements. Thus, these can now be considered as the universal facts in the story. This happened because the characters were drawn to these events. Thats why there were able to tell what actually happened. The parts that didnt draw much attention are the main sources of the distinction between the perceptions of truth among the different characters. As an example, the priest, being a priest could not tell much about the appearance of the woman riding the horse while Tajomaru gave very descriptive accounts of the Masago looked like.
In the movie, the story started off with the woodcutter mumbling repeatedly that he cannot understand. Other scenes from the frame story are the priest crying out the he is losing faith in mankind. All of these reactions are caused by the different perceptions of truth among the characters in the central story. These reactions bend the theme of the story to it becoming the different perceptions of truth affects society. The different perceptions strip the people of the things that they learned and are lead to ask the most basic questions. This can be seen in frame scene where priest, even after spending his life learning about mankind and his relationship with the creator, was lead to questioning his trust on the same things that he lived to serve. This happened upon learning the different versions of the story. But, the last scene shows the way to handle being stripped to the basics of human thinking.
In the last scene, the priest entrusts the baby to the woodcutter though he was suspected of lying during the court proceedings and of stealing the knife of Masago. This portrays that to progress, sometimes we just need to trust even if we dont know whether the person is telling the truth or just how he perceives the truth to be.
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