Knowledge In Gwendolyn Macewen's 'A Breakfast For Barbarians'
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A Breakfast for Barbarians: how learning is a bittersweet experience In literary texts, such as Shakespeare’s ‘‘Romeo and Juliet’’ or Rowling’s ‘‘Harry Potter’’ series, the theme of knowledge can easily pass unnoticed since it is showcased, more often than not, as a tool that helps the protagonist in his quest. In ‘‘A Breakfast for Barbarians’’, Gwendolyn MacEwen takes that theme and presents it as a quest: she addresses herself to her people, her barbarians, calling for the abandonment of ignorance, starting an intellectual revolution, leading her people all the way to the end while showing us, readers, what a reckless search for wisdom leads to. By making hunger the dominant motif and presenting the deterioration of human health, all while…show more content… In fact, MacEwen makes an interesting analogy between food and knowledge, referring to learning as the brain’s ‘‘golden breakfast’’ (6), making it seem eminently important. However, she quickly stops glorifying food, and instead starts using apocalyptic vocabulary to describe it: ‘‘boiled chimera’’ (15) or ‘‘apocalyptic tea’’ (16). This sudden halt in glorification implies that the absorption of nutrients is terrible for our surroundings. By using this specific set of adjectives, she presents the possibility of a gluttony- related catastrophe happening. Furthermore, her ‘‘it’s-the-end-of-the-world’’ ways of describing food foreshadow the end of this poem: a ‘‘table of bones and scrap metal’’ (33), a ‘‘junk-heaped table’’ (34). In other words, the reader is left with the aftermath, represented as a chaotic-looking table, of the extravagant pursuit of wisdom. Such imagery is immensely thought-provoking and allows the author to easily get her point across: humans use their resources in an excessive fashion and only seek self-enrichment. They fail to take into consideration their entourage and their environment, causing the degradation of