The Image of Sandhill Cranes and Identity Crisis in the Echo Maker

Abstract

Richard Powers has established himself as one of the most well-known and representative writers in the postmodern literary world with his deployment of the arts and the sciences to such an extent. The Echo Maker, as his most successful work was titled as the Nation Book Award for Fiction of 2006. Sandhill cranes possess a lot a space in The Echo Maker, at the very beginning of the novel, Powers describes as the witnesses of Mark’s accident and insert them everywhere in the novel. In this sense, nature’s spirituality embodied in sandhill cranes’ serves as remarkable contrast to human society’ paucity of spirituality. Powers uses sandhill cranes as a metaphor for the identification of human beings and tries to call back the human race from jeopardy through the echoes of sandhill cranes. Given that, in the novel, sandhill cranes serve as a sharp contrast with the self-disintegrated humans such as characters in the novel. They inspire us with their eternal spirituality, their vitality and resilience and their intensive reverence toward nature and life.