Naturalism uses the natural world, or those things within that humans have created sometimes, to "speak" to us. What they have to say may be bleak. This is NOT Romanticism, like Wordsworth, who uses nature to tell us good things about human possibility. It is not necessarily about transcendence or epiphanies. It is often about humans' place in the world as just one species among many, and subject to all the same things as other species. 

So: the Sublime. It's the next thing on my list of things for you to think about. Where do you see this in the story? It's almost a part of Naturalism here. It's that feeling you get when you are in the deep forest, or out on a boat at night, and look up at a cloudless sky, with no ambient light. How do you feel? Philosophers, as well as literary critics, have looked to describe this for a very long time. Some call this feeling, "the Sublime," a "mixture of fear and awe."  Awe is an overpowered feeling. The fear is a kind of implicit knowlege that we just don't know what we don't know, that there is something much bigger than ourselves. It's wonder, but also tinged with a little bit of "scary." It's both beautiful AND terrifying.

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In the context of naturalism and the Sublime we can see the intertwining of human existence with the ... View the full answer