“The inner fire is the most important thing mankind possess.” -Edith Sodergran. In the movie, Smoke Signals the symbols of fire, ash, and water come up often and are very important to the understanding of the movie. Victor Joseph and Thomas Builds-the Fire are the protagonist who go on a journey to Phoenix, Arizona to recover Victor’s dad’s ashes. Through thought the movie Victor goes through the heroic cycle. Each phase of the heroic cycle is linked to one of the three elements and describes a character's state of being. In the movie Smoke Signals, Victor Joseph goes through the three stages of fire, ash, and water and in return changes into a better ,more pure, person. “What matters most is how well you walk through fire”…show more content… The second element in the cycle is ash, which represents memories or separation. The step of ash in the literal sense tends to mean memories of someone, for the fact that when Victor holds his father's ashes he remembers all the bad times, at the beginning of the movie. As Thomas Builds-the Fire states, “Victor I am going to make one more trip to the river and I am going to toss these in and your Dad’s ashes will rise and rise into the heavens, just like a salmon.” (Erye). And after Victor responds with “Funny I was thinking about doing the same thing myself. I mean I never thought of my dad like a salmon but it would be just like cleaning out the attic, like throwing things away when they have no more use.” (Eyre). This quote explains the idea of ash being the sort of inbetween fire and water. Ash in the figurative state is representative of the stage where you start to figure things out and your anger is burned out, so when Victor realized that his dad wasn’t the man he thought he was and heard the stories he started to realize his father's thought process, and this is really what the ash stage is all…show more content… The last phase in the cycle is water which represents purity, forgiveness, and cleansing. The quote stated in the first sentence really describes Victor in the sense that he has to forgive his father after he has passed away to finally reach the final stage of water. Water is figuratively stands for acceptance, because to reach become pure in the heart one must first accept what happened so one can forgive. At the end of the movie Thomas states, “How do we forgive our fathers? Maybe in a dream. Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us too often, or forever, when we were little? Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage, or making us nervous because there never seemed to be any rage there at all?.....If we forgive our fathers, what is left?”(Eyre). This states on Thomas’s stance on it is very hard to forgive someone for doing you wrong, but it is very important in life to accept and forgive, especially in the cycle. The point in the movie when Victor finally gets to the water state is when he realizes his father’s mistakes were not Victor’s fault and he realized it was his father’s fault for the fire and he was suffering and in pain, that is why his dad left his family. After Victor goes on a run and sees, for the first time, a positive image of his dad, and after the run he claims his dad’s ashes for the first time. At the end of the movie you can tell Victor is in the water stage and in
