A Wolf Called Wander

The Wolf Star is both a physical celestial body present in the night sky and a greater ideal that represents the belief system that Wander’s mother impresses upon her young pups from the time they are born. Throughout the novel, the Wolf Star functions as both a symbol and motif. For the pups within the story, it symbolizes an almost spiritual connection to their place in the natural world and expresses their view of themselves as parts of an interconnected whole. For the reader, the Wolf Star serves as a motif, for while the story is driven by authentic, scientifically accurate wolf behavior, Roseanne Parry also makes liberal use of both personification and anthropomorphism to endow his non-human narrator with humanlike attributes. In the real world, complex pack relationships and powerful connections to physical territory have been observed to drive the collective behavior of wolf packs, but in order to develop an imaginary version of a wolf’s inner psychological landscape, Parry uses the Wolf Star as a way of explaining the wolf belief system that she creates for her characters. Thus, she invites the reader to imagine how wolves might intellectually and metaphysically understand themselves, their culture, and their purpose on earth in relation to the landscape around them and the cosmos above.