Summary Of The Narrow Road To The Deep North

How does Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North help historians understand the experiences of prisoners of war during World War Two?

Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North criticizes the superficiality of public hero worship whilst simultaneously commending the hero. This is done through the depiction of the sufferings of prisoners of war (POWs) that were forced to work on the Burma-Thai railroad and the exploration of their experiences upon return to Australia. Although the novel focuses mainly on the experiences of Dorrigo Evans, it portrays the experiences in the POW camp from the point of view of both the prisoners and their capturers’, which develops a seemingly unbiased account of the events that occur in POW camps.

He follows the stories of three soldiers, Colonel Kota and Major Nakamura, two Japanese officers, and the Goanna, a Korean guard. He accurately describes the pressures put upon the Japanese soldiers from their service of honor and duty to the Emperor, as shown through Major Nakamura. Ridden with jungle ticks and dependent on methamphetamine, it is clear the Major is also a prisoner of The Line. He looks down upon his prisoners because that what his training had taught him to do and he, like many other Japanese soldiers, wished to “never live to experience the shame as a prisoner”. The ethics of the Japanese military of this time were based on the Bushido tradition that commanded complete sacrifice, and regarded surrendering as an intolerable dishonor. Major Nakamura portrays prisoners as being “less than a man”, a view that is mirrored in Colonel Kota, as he states that “[the prisoners] complain about insubstantial matters such as being slapped” and proposes “what gives cowards the right not to be slapped?”. This depicts them as sharing the view that their race is superior to all others, and the Thai-Burma railroad is crucial in expressing this because they are building what “the Europeans said was not possible” and it was being constructed “without European machinery”. Major Nakamura and Colonel Kota

With each of the characters facing their own fate, Flanagan shows how some men could not cope and chose to prematurely end their lives as “they died off quickly, strangely, in car smashes and suicides and creeping diseases”. The return of soldiers after the Second World War is not a well-documented topic, and one that Flanagan has provided a thorough account of through the diverse ways each individual coped with their new civilian life. Through his attempt to understand and explain the behavior of the soldiers on their return, Flanagan has altered the overall perception by the public from the view of them being racist, ignorant and frequently drunken to misunderstood and suffering men. After enduring the horrendous suffering in the POW camps, some soldiers returned to more heartache as they discover that their loved ones have found other men, or they begin to feel trapped in the routines of suburban life, or they cannot cope unless they hide inside themselves and just say nothing; all of which was worsened by the army encouraging them to not talk about their experience because it was “hardly a hero’s tale in the first place”, being a prisoner of war “wasn’t Kokoda or a Lancaster over the Ruth Valley”. Flanagan successfully depicts the way in which the POWs had undergone suffering unimaginable to society at the time, but also