Beach Burial Kenneth Slessor Analysis

With every journey comes a destination which is dependent on the degree of the individual and their will to potentially better themselves. A journey offers travelers the opportunity to extend themselves physically, intellectually and emotionally as they respond to challenges. Ruby Moon by Matt Cameron is a contemporary fractured fairytale in the form of a play that explores the grim, Australian legend of the missing child. This text portrays real issues in an absurd representation which forces the reader on an imaginative journey as well as the characters in an inner journey to establish an identity. Beach Burial by Kenneth Slessor is a distressing elegy about loss of life through war. Slessor’s sophisticated language, allows the responder

This elegy is ultimately written for all soldiers of war and sends the ironic message that the soilders who have fought against each other and could have killed each other are now all floating on the same coastline receiving equal treatment and being buried with their enemy. The theme of anonymity is extensively portrayed throughout this piece as Slessor constantly refers to ‘unknown’ soldiers or ‘someone’. Slessor uses personification and dehumanization to depict the loss of identity within each of the soldiers and the obscured effects of war to show the continuous movement forward of the world despite losses and victories. Personification is shown in the second stanza, 'Between the sob and clubbing of the gunfire '; the use of this technique ironically emphasises that the guns seem to mourn the loss more than humanity does. This leaves the audience feeling distraught and pity for the soldiers as it gives them a sense of the emotions linked to war. Personification of the rain in the fourth stanza, ‘The breath of the wet season has washed their inscriptions’ indicates that the world will continue advancing, regardless of the scale of their sacrifices. Slessor also dehumanizes these sailors by the use of language such as ‘dead seamen’, to exemplify his statement about the number of losses that the enemy

Ruby Moon explores the relentlessness of grief as two parents continue to return to the same place with more questions than they have answers. Ray and Sylvie are trapped in a never-ending cycle of their own grief, unable to move on with their lives because of their oblivion towards Ruby’s disappearance: “We can’t keep riding into this tunnel…we’re facing the wrong way…” This metaphor, conveyed by Ray in the Epilogue, captures the mental and emotional difficulty that Ray and Sylvie are experiencing and reveals to the audience their rather troubled relationship and delusional reality. The characters in ruby moon are shown undergoing at least two of the five stages of grief: Denial, Bargaining, Anger, Depression, and Acceptance as a result of Ruby’s disappearance. “SID slips into a routine. He adopts the pose of a distraught mother searching. His voices are cartoon-like.” In most probably the most absurd moment of the play, Sid is trying to ultimately create a play within the play, Ruby Moon. The use of this technique verfumdungseffekt, or more commonly known as the distancing effect, alienates the readers from the initial characters to prevent the audience’s emotions towards them. Sid alienating and distancing himself from the rest of the world is his way of defining the real purpose in life