Genre
Historical Fiction
Setting and Context
Set in Australia and the Western Front during World War I
Narrator and Point of View
Narrated in third-person from the perspective of an omniscient speaker
Tone and Mood
Violent, Macabre, Bleak
Protagonist and Antagonist
The protagonist is Jim Saddler, while the antagonist is the loss of innocence and the violence in warfare.
Major Conflict
The major conflict is the protagonist being thrown into a violent environment torn from the idyllic serene garden. The horrific experience in the trenches stands in stark contrast to the peace and innocence of the estuary.
Climax
The climax is the dream-like sequence Jim experiences during his death which involves an encounter with his deceased friend Clancy.
Foreshadowing
The troubling relationship Jim had with his father in his childhood foreshadows the brutal reality of warfare that will consume his life.
Understatement
“He struck something, another body, and recoiled. But in the sudden flash above the crater’s rim saw that it was, after all, only a dead man. He had stopped being scared of the dead.”
Allusions
The estuary and Jim’s idyllic experience in it allude to the biblical Garden of Eden as the garden represents all that is innocent and sublime.
Imagery
“When he stepped out of the shop with his new boots creaking and the old ones in a box under his arm he saw that the streets were, in fact, filled with an odd electricity, as if, while he was inside, a quick storm had come up and equally swiftly passed, changing the sky and setting the pavements, the window-panes, the flanks of passing vehicles in a new and more vivid light.”
Paradox
N/A
Parallelism
The dualities of good and evil, peace and war, naivety and experience are demonstrated through the parallel between the estuary and the war trenches.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
“They ate huge meals under a fan in the dining-room, with a lazy Susan to deal at breakfast…”
Lazy Susan is a metonymy for a rotating tray.
Personification
The narrator personifies the birds at the estuary. For instance “…they moved with their little lives, if they moved at all, so transiently across his lands – even when they were natives and spent their whole lives there”
