Summary

Chapter One of “March” is titled “Survival.” In the first part of this chapter, author May considers the fable of “The Grasshopper and the Ants,” in which a grasshopper who had spent the summer enjoying himself asks for help, in the middle of winter, from ants who had spent the summer working hard to prepare for the hard times. The ants turn him away, saying the grasshopper should have spent the summer more wisely. May suggests that a key moral of the story is that “the wise do not have time for the trivialities of leisure. They are engaged in the business of survival” (198). She also argues that the grasshopper was simply doing what he was created to do – i.e., sing, in her perspective – and that the ants were “sanctimonious” and “judgmental” (199). She suggests that the ants, as portrayed in the fable...