The Cone Gatherers: Key Scenes

The Deer Drive
1. Duror insists to LRC on Calum and Neil taking part in deer drive - he sees it as his opportuinity to bring harm to Calum
  1. Tulloch's defense of CGs shocks LRC as she is being talked back to by an inferior
  2. believes anything that Duror says about CGs because she does not see them as people.
  3. She refuses to give Neil and Calum a lift home in the rain etc. She listens to Duror when he tells her to keep them in a hut in the wood rather than the beach house where there is heat etc.
  4. not bad but she is only as good as she makes herself out to be – she surrenders in the end.
2. clear visible indications of Duror’s evil and decline
3. Foreshadowing of climax – destruction of innocence e.g deer
4. “His going therefore must be a destruction, an agony, a crucifixion.”
  1. The reference to the crucifixion here hints at the fact that innocence will be sacrificed in order for goodness to prevail.
5. Calum runs with the deer as if he is one; This is contrasted with Durors behaviour – he projects his own hatred onto the deer.
6. “Duror seemed possessed by a fury to rise up and attack the hunchback”
7. Deer hunt viewed by gentry as symbol of status and duty yet turns into a ‘shocking demeaning spectacle’
8. When Calum flung himself, in sympathy, upon a wounded deer at the dramatic climax of the deer drive, further illustrating his harmony and empathy for all living things, Duror came leaping out of the woods.
  1. “He seemed to be laughing in some kind of berserk joy. There was a knife in his hand.”
  2. Duror’s actions (he slit the deer’s throat, then appeared to stay crouching beside it) were those of a man completely out of control. He seemed to believe he had been attacking his wife
9. Duror blames Calum for incident
10. Roderick – represents hope.
  1. just and perceptive who, throughout the novel, pricks his mother’s Christian conscience.
  2. dislikes Duror and recognises something bad in him. He has greater vision than his mother.
  3. has a sense of what’s right or wrong at the deer drive. He recognises the struggle between good and evil that is always going on
The Beach Hut
1. Neil and Calum sit in the beach house, sheltering from the rain. They inspect some abandoned toys and discuss how attitudes towards them differ between the classes.
2. Calum wants to take home and repair a broken doll but Neil sees this as stealing. Lady Runcie Campbell arrives and demands that they leave.
  1. "What is the meaning of this?... For God's sake get out!"
  2. The doll being broken is representative of innocence being destroyed.
3. LRC is denial of her wrongful actions
  1. "Men in their job must be accustomed to rain"
4. LRC determine that the CGs must leave the estate that weekend
5. LRC now concerned over Duror and his Deer Drive actions
  1. Now faces inner confilct of good vs evil: wants CGs gone, but isnt convinced by Duror's story
6. Duror accuses Calum of taking doll for perverted uses
7. Roderick:
  1. "Didn't somebody say on the wireless that in the war-time everybody's equal?"
  2. "There was room for us all, mother."
8. Leads directly to Roderick getting stuck up a tree
  1. Neil refuses to help retrieve him
    1. "She can not one day treat us lower than dogs, and the next day order us to do her bidding!"
    2. This refusal sets Duror over the edge leading to Murder of Calum
      1. LRC's realisation of all of her wrongfullness
        "She could not pray, but she could weep; and as she wept pity, and purified hope, and joy welled up in her heart."

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The Cone Gatherers: Key Scenes

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	Created by Julia falconer almost 10 years ago