A Comparative and Symbolic Study of Materialism in Peter Hoeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow and John Case’s The First Horseman

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow (1992), a novel by Danish author Peter Høeg, is about a transplanted Greenlander who investigates the mysterious death of a six–year–old Inuit boy who lived in her housing complex in Copenhagen. Suspecting wrongdoing, Smilla uncovers a trail of clues leading towards a secretive corporation with several mysterious expeditions to Greenland frozen landscape where she discovers the entrance to the Greenland mining ice cave, hosting the meteorite that fell in 1859. Throughout the novel, Smilla comments on the venality and rapaciousness of modern Western societies. The Firs Horseman (1999) is a stellar science thriller by John Case in which a fanatical terrorist group is about to release an easily transmittable form of the Spanish Flu virus into the atmosphere to reduce the human population radically of the planet to reach the so–called Earth’s ecologically sustainable level of human life. The novel reference touches on the famous four horsemen of the New Testament Apocalypse. Whether or not he was originally identified with the spread of pestilence, the apocalyptic connection indicates nasty consequences for an unknowing world. While Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow involves a meteorite, a murderous scientist and threat of parasitic worms, The First Horseman is concerned with Islamic terrorists and influenza plagues. Both works, according to the author of this article, are about outsiders, who are marginalised by society or who choose to place themselves outside the mainstream.

کلیدواژه ها:

Apocalypse ، Colonialism ، Greenland ، Inuit ، Meteorite ، Siberia ، Terrorists