Touching Spirit Bear

In Touching Spirit Bear, Ben Mikaelsen use symbols to represent many things in the book. We do it everyday like lol meaning laugh out loud and in some languages they use pictures to represent words. But Mikaelsen goes deeper in his symbols by making them represent something like emotion.

Mikaelsen uses cake and its ingredients as a symbol. He uses the ingredients first, because most things by itself taste bitter. But when you mix everything together and make a cake, they taste amazing. So something by itself is normally not as good as a bunch of things mixed together.

He also used the anger stick as a symbol. It represents anger and happiness. The left end was anger and the right end was happiness. He said that people try to eliminate anger all together by breaking of the left end of the stick. But there will always be a left end to a stick. So anger will never go away but the best thing to do with anger is control it. Also paying attention to the positive things in life not the negatives will keep your life happier.

Another symbol Mikaelsen used was the totem pole. Whenever Cole saw an animal he danced to what that animal does and learns something from the animal. After each dance he carves a head of each animal into the totem pole that way he remembers what he learned from each animal.

Also Mikaelsen used a hot dog as a symbol. You can either choose the hot dog to feed you or for the hot dog to be a feast. This represents your choice of what you want something to be. Either have high expectations or expect the bare minimum.

The final symbol that I could think of that he used was the ancestor rock. Every time Cole took it up the hillside he realized that his ancestors went through pain and suffering like him. At the top he pushed it down with all his might to get ride of his anger or at least release some of it.

In Touching Spirit Bear, Ben Mikaelsen use symbols to represent many things in the book. We do it everyday like lol meaning laugh out loud and in some languages they use pictures to represent words. But Mikaelsen goes deeper in his symbols by making them represent something like emotion.