Essay Questions

Explain Dorrigo Evans’ perception of gender using his astonishment at his brother’s crying.

Flanagan expounds, “Watching his brother, Dorrigo Evans had wondered what it was that would make a grown man cry. Later, crying became simply affirmation of feeling, and feeling the only compass in life. Feeling became fashionable and emotion became a theatre in which people were players who no longer knew who they were off the stage.” Initially, Dorrigo Evans believed that men are not to required to cry for it is a manifestation of weakness. Dorrigo assumed that men should be able to repress their emotions instead of exposing them through crying.

Outline a psychoanalytic explanation of Tom’s behaviour after returning from war.

Flanagan writes, “That night Tom came home they burnt the Kaiser on a bonfire. Tom said nothing of the war, of the Germans, of the gas and the tanks and the trenches they had heard about. He said nothing at all. One man’s feeling is not always equal to all life is. Sometimes it’s not equal to anything much at all. He just stared into the flames.” Psychoanalytically, Tom yearns to Repress the war memories he accumulated throughout the war. Electing not to speak about the memories safeguards him from the requirement to recall all the dreadful experiences which he endured.