The Antidote

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of animal cruelty and/or death.

The novel’s Dust Bowl locale is both physical setting and metaphor. The dust poses a significant disturbance to daily life in Uz, making it physically difficult to physically be outside: the dust permeates the air and the landscape, making it hard to see and to breathe. In this way, it poses health a risk that indeed harms some of citizens greatly. It is notable, too, that it is first the effect then the cause of poor farming practices throughout the prairie: The loss of valuable topsoil through farming missteps creates the dust, and as the dust spreads (further exacerbated by a drought) it poses challenges to the growing of future crops. In this way, it creates a vicious cycle that many residents of Uz see no solution for: They feel compelled to flee from Uz in search of a new home where they may escape the dust permanently. The dust, then, acts as a literal punishment for the way the people have abandoned the techniques of the Pawnee, which nurtured the land rather than harmed it.

However, the dust takes on further significance as the novel points to the way that not only is the physical sight of the townspeople clouded, but so is their insight, knowledge, and judgment.