Epigraphs are like little appetizers to the great entrée of a story. They illuminate important aspects of the story, and they get us headed in the right direction.
Epigraph #1: "In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell what a wild, and rough, and stubborn wood this was, which in my thought renews the fear!"—Dante, The Divine Comedy
Epigraph #2: "Harmony, like a following breeze at sea, is the exception."—Harvey Oxenhorn, Tuning the Rig
What's up with the epigraph?
Epigraph #1:
The first quote is the very first line of Inferno, the first section of Dante's The Divine Comedy. For some Shmoopy analysis of this exact quote, click here. Basically, the speaker (Dante, the narrator) has found himself kind of lost and off the beaten path—a.k.a. the path of righteousness, a.k.a. God's way. Where is he headed? Well, the title (Inferno) probably gave that one away...
We don't have to think too hard to find the parallels between this quote and the novel. As in Dante's poem, the protagonist of Snow Falling on Cedars finds himself far afield from his original life path. Instead of marrying Hatsue and living happily ever after, which is what he had hoped to do, Hatsue is forced to leave San Piedro once the U.S. enters the World War II. Then, Ishmael enters the "inferno" of war itself, enduring unspeakable horrors.
When that's all over, minus an arm and rejected by Hatsue, Ishmael finds it hard to follow in his dad's footsteps and develop into the kind of scrupulously moral man his father (and primary role model), Arthur Chambers, had been. Somehow, after all he's seen and been through, his morality is all out of whack. In short, Ishmael endures a couple of different "infernos" in this novel, and definitely (like the speaker of Dante's poem) ends up hopelessly off-track.
Epigraph #2:
The second epigraph is a line from author and academic Harvey Oxenhorn's account of his travels with a scientific whaling expedition. It fits in nicely with the first epigraph, since it's basically trying to get at the idea that life's path is rarely easy or, to use Dante's word, "straight." A "following wind," which would help speed you along in your chosen direction on the water, is not easy to come by—and neither is "harmony," Oxenhorn asserts.
Given the novel's central focus on sailing and strife, this epigraph seems pretty dead on to us. (Oh, and fun fact for you, Shmoopers: Poet Robert Pinsky, who did the afterword for the latest edition of Tuning the Rig, also produced one of the more celebrated translations of the Inferno—curiously, though, not the translation Guterson used for the other epigraph.)