I got off to a slow start with Three Day Road, but my stop and start page-per-hour progress was rather short lived. After slogging through the first 50 pages, I marched through the next hundred in a matter of hours; hopped, skipped and ran through the hundred after that; and made a mad dash through what remained in the shortest hour of my life.
While I had no trouble putting the novel down, I couldn’t get Niska and Xavier’s story out of my head (Elijah, unfortunately, I didn’t much care for). I was enraptured by Niska’s description of her wilderness home, delighted by her stories of Xavier’s childhood hunting exploits, horrified by her losses, and terrified by Xavier’s description of the war. Three Day Road finally made war real to me- I struggled all throughout high-school with an inability to understand what war was actually like. Textbooks, documentaries and feature films all failed to impress upon me the true horrors of war; I was outraged, yes, and saddened by death and struck dumb by the magnitude of the World Wars, but reading a fictional account was what drove home the devastation and destruction of life in the trenches, and allowed me to glimpse the extreme toll that it takes on a human soul.
Two of the most prominent themes in Boyden’s novel are death and identity. The symbol of “turning windigo” reflects both of these themes- demonstrating that in order for someone to endure the harsh realities of killing people they sometimes must face a shift in identity. As Three Day Road progresses, Elijah slowly descended into madness. Like the windigo woman Niska described in her childhood Elijah’s hunger (though metaphorical) could only be satisfied by human flesh. The scene in which he offers Xavier meat, joking that it is “German” is especially reflective of his complete loss of identity- he has reached the point where he no longer holds life in any regard and can crack jokes about eating another person. Throughout the novel, Elijah becomes almost larger than life, and while he is a symbol of hope for many in the trenches, this slow evolution is reminiscent of the changes Niska described in Micah’s wife when she returned to the hunting camp.
Later in the book, after Xavier is forced to kill his friend, the people around him begin to mistake him for Elijah, again, the image of windigos interacts with the larger theme of identity, showing that Xavier’s identity is inherently caught up in his relationship with Elijah, even after Elijah’s death. In many ways, it is this case of mistaken identity that brings Xavier home safely, but it also is something he must struggle with as he confronts the reality that his best friend had devolved into a killer fueled by bloodlust and hunger for victory, and that in part, Xavier’s delay in rising to his role as protector of the people around him as a windigo killer was what allowed his friend’s identity to change so drastically. Although Elijah was the killer, Xavier shares, in some ways, the guilt of the number of deaths on his friends hands.