The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks Summary
Donald Harington

The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks Summary

Harington's play on the homonyms "ark" and "arc" expresses three major themes that relate to the concerns of generation, refuge, stasis, progress, and nature's entropy or the decline inherent in nature's processes. "Arc, and also ark," the narrator explains, "comes from an Indo-European word root, arkw, which means bow or arrow (it is uncertain which, perhaps both together as a unit, since one is no good without the other) ... Arc is also an obsolete form of ark, which meant originally a chest, box, coffer, and hence a place of refuge, as in the Biblical Noah's vessel and as in all over this present book."

The ark that is the two-in-one, like the bow and the arrow, "both together as a unit," the narrator calls "bigeminality." It represents generation, the coming together that produces a new identity. Its model, seen in the first of the chapter illustrations, is the...

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