Summary Of Tim Winton's Breath Sawyer

Within Tim Winton’s novel Breath, Sawyer, Australia seems to hold most of the major events of the story in the first 50 pages. Although the novel begins at a scene of an apparent suicide of a teenage boy, the narrator, Bruce, almost immediately takes the readers into the memories of his childhood. He changes the setting suddenly, despite already establishing a clear tone and mood of his current living situation. At first it is a strange transition, as he tells the story of his boyhood through a series of memories rather than one continuous narrative and weave between the past and the present almost seamlessly. However, it becomes clear that by bringing readers back to this period of his life and where he grew up, it provides readers with another window of understanding of Bruce’s character through Winton’s use of external and internal reality of Sawyer. The beginning of the memories exposes the external reality of the small town, where an idea of an ordinary and safe and quiet place is born. Bruce describes the town as “a mill town” where “you kept to the mill, the town, the river” (Winton 11, 12). It seems that it is an expectation of the townspeople that everyone followed the unspoken rules of leading a

Winton uses it to not only set the stage for Bruce’s retelling of his childhood, but as a method to delve deeper into who Bruce really is. From the very first sentence about the setting of Sawyer from strictly Bruce’s perspective, it is evident to the reader that he has strong feelings about the town and how it had shaped him into a boy who never truly found his potential. Moreover, when Winton describes the vicious ocean and its beauty, Bruce is revealed to find his love for adrenaline and surfing. Through the technique of changing the external setting, the internal setting plays a critical role in understanding the narrator’s disposition much deeper than