During King Philip's War of 1675-1676, a wave of violence between British colonists and Native Americans swept through New England. During the months following this war, Mary Rowlandson wrote her autobiographical “Prisoner Narrative,” a timeless text that would inspire many other tales of hardships overcome in captivity. Throughout her piece, Rowlandson pairs her experience with Puritan thought, judging her captors and circumstances through a biblical lens. Mediated by her religion, instead of seeing her captors as entirely evil, she sees them as intentionally guided and designed by a willful God. Furthermore, Rowlandson rates the Native American design as impressive and admirable, rather than grotesque. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Throughout her story, Mary Rowlandson often demonstrates her peculiar moral system during meals shared with her captors. In his twentieth and final removal, Rowlandson lists his latest observations on the nature of the natives, making strange observations about their eating habits and their stomach for wild meat. “Yet with what admiration did the Lord preserve them for His holy purposes, and to the destruction of many yet among the English,” he writes. “I have not seen a man, a woman or a child starve.” The sentiment here is striking: for much of her story Rowlandson describes her captors with contempt and disgust, but here we see something more like admiration. There is a mix of attitudes in Rowlandson's future confessions, but the next few sentences of this scene highlight the writer's knack for dramatized observation. Rowlandson's keen memory results in rich details of his experience, but such descriptions are often easy to dismiss as derisive or infuriating. To accentuate his point, Rowlandson details this section with a list of what the natives eat: “They would eat horse guts and ears and all sorts of wild fowl…. Turtles, frogs, squirrels, dogs, skunks, rattlesnakes; yes, the very bark of the trees.” This is a pretty visceral description of the foods Rowlandson encountered while in captivity. Consider the underuse of conjunctions (and overuse of commas) here – an asyndeton – as the passage highlights the willingness to eat anything through its exhaustive length. By forgoing summaries or conjunctions, Rowlandson highlights the breadth of the Native diet. As an isolated passage, Rowlandson's voice might sound disgusted and appalled by her captors, but the pace of this sentence accelerates the transition to a more nuanced idea: it is in her assessment of these habits that Rowlandson preaches admiration. In the following sentence, Rowlandson writes that he finds the natives' ability to survive in harsh conditions admirable: "I cannot but stand in admiration to see the wonderful power of God in providing for so vast a number of our enemies in the wilderness, where there is no was nothing to see, but from hand to mouth, Rowlandson subverts an expectation of anger and resentment by moving towards admiration of his captors is impressive. A simplified reading of Rowlandson's moral philosophy would expect her to beg God to starve her captives, rather than feed and nourish them, but here she does the opposite. It is therefore not surprising that the Puritan view of the world of Mary Rowlandson is the basis of this judgment. Rowlandson's admiration for. 2017.