The Mystical Descent: An Ecocritical Reading of D.G. Driver's Dragon Surf

Abstract

This article titled, The Mystical Descent: An Ecocritical Reading of D.G. Driver’s Dragon Surf sets out to argue that D.G. Driver's Dragon Surf is a young adult novel which eventually emerges as a vibrant manifestation of environmental ethics. This article diagnoses Driver as an eco-novelist, who grants profound agency to the dragon. For which, she pulls off a dragon from the Chinese mythology and ordains it the power of agency. The dragon is entrusted with the power of redemption. It hails from the non-human world, and more precisely, from the Chinese folkloric myth. Hence, the dragon here proposes itself, at first, to be a mystical element.

Driver, further uses the novel to establish, how the dragon enacts the ecological crisis. Hence, Eric, who is just fifteen, emerges not on heroic terms. Instead, he comes as an individual who listens, feels and even responds to the non-human world. Eventually, Eric emerges as a

pedagogic model for ecological awakening in the novel.

This article reaches its findings that the Dragon Surf literalizes a drowning into the

oceanic glory which is an ambience of both danger and revelation. The dragon, in ecocritical terms, comes as an interstitial space or liminal space that blurs the boundary between the human and the non-human. Driver positions the dragon of the Chinese mythology as a symbolic guardian of the environmental depletion. And Eric's mystical connect with the dragon documents the immediate imperative need for ecological governance. This article also brings forth the statement that by intertwining the Chinese mythology with Santa Cruz, California's surfing, Driver asserts that the humanity's maturity lies in the recognition of the true relationship with the flora and the fauna.