Compare the depiction of the relationship between humans and the natural world in two of the short stories from Anthony Doerr's The Shell Collector that we have read and discussed in class. Are the two stories ultimately anthropocentric or ecocentric in their perspective?

 

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The Shell Collector by Anthony Doerr is a collection of eight great stories about different characters. However, two of it depict differently the relationship between humans and the natural world.

The story of The Shell Collector itself shows the indirect connection of humans to nature. It is about a blind marine biologist who gets famous because he found the cure for a fatal disease. The cure turns out to be from a venom of a cone shell.

In here, we can see the indirect relationship of humans to nature comparing to the direct one in the story of The Hunter's Wife. It is when the blind man discovered that the shell is the cure for the fatal disease of the American woman and the native girl. We can clearly see here that humans and the natural world are indirectly interrelated because the nature itself is the cure, and the humans themselves are the reason of the cure's discovery.

On the other hand, the story of The Hunter's Wife depicts direct relationship between humans and the natural world. It is about a hunter who is purely dedicated to his hunting work, but he soon found out that his wife can talk to the spirit of the forest animals.

In here, we can see the relationship of humans to the natural world in the "wife's character. Comparing to The Shell's Collector, relationship here among humans and nature is more direct. It is on the fact that the wife; as a human, straightforwardly connects to animals by talking to their spirits.

On the other hand, the two stories are ecocentric in perspective. Wherein it means that the entire environment and all life forms in it are all important.

How?

We can see that on the importance of the shell and the blind man, in which without the existence of the two - the man and nature, the cure will never be found out.

We can also see that on the connection of the wife and the animals, wherein without that, the message of the story will never be revealed - that nature and humans are interrelated to each other, no matter what.