"The Enchanted Bluff", by Willa Cather, takes place in the bare cornfields of Nebraska during the early 1900s where only rivers liven up the landscape. Six boys delve into the idea of a city on top of a bluff in the desert, they become captivated with the idea of visiting the bluff. The boys eagerly discuss ways of dominating this mystifying bluff: throwing up a ladder, or using a rocket. All the boys vow to get to the bluff some day. Twenty years pass and none visit it. One of the young boys tells the story to his son and his son thinks of nothing else but the bluff. The author does an excellent job of providing vivid imagery throughout the story, which helps the read to capture a real sense of the town. The tone helps the reader to imagine not only the bluff, but more importantly paints a descriptive picture of the people and everyday life in the town. In the "Enchanted Bluff", Willa Cather uses local color to convey descriptions of both the setting and characters to create the relaxed tone of the story. The characters are vividly described through the relaxed tone of the story. Cather, for example, describes how " Fritz and Otto were sons of the little German tailorragged boys of ten and twelve with sunburned hair, weather stained faces and pale blue eyes (Cather 412). " Through these detailed descriptions, the reader can see that, " Cather possesses an extraordinary knowledge of what ordinary people feel and think in their daily lives (Wells). Through Cathers descriptions, the reader gets a feeling as though the characters are actual people. The reader gets a sense of how the boys lived when Cather mentions how, "Tip worked hard in his fathers grocery store every afternoon, and swept it out before school in the morning, even his recreations were laborious (Cather 413). When reading Cathers works, there is a feeling that she "taught the best of all philosophies, that of love, hard work, and courage (Wells)". Through the tone ...
