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The Hunchback In The Park Analysis

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The Hunchback in the Park The Hunchback in the Park is a poem by Dylan Thomas that depicts a deformed man, who spends his days in the park; it is a place of refuge, but also a place where he can find hope. The hunchback is a nameless man who wants to escape the cruelty of the world by visiting a park every day. His experiences are symbolic of his inner struggles with his own self-worth as a deformed person, but also an imaginary world, where he can dream of something better.
The binary between man versus animal in the poem depicts a human being compared to an animal, a dog, that negatively portrays this hunchback as captive and subservient, “Slept at night in the dog kennel but nobody chained him up,” he sleeps in a cage, but there is no one that forces him …show more content…

The park is an imaginary sanctuary, where the hunchback can dream of something better. The poem contains binaries of man versus animal, childhood versus adulthood, and crooked versus straight. The hunchback experiences the dominant binaries in the imaginary, and the submissive binaries are the hunchbacks reality. He lives a submissive life, he has subjected his identity at the feet of his deformity where he now flees from the children in the park but longs for childhood and innocence, he does not want the world to value beauty, but longs for companionship with a tall and beautiful woman. The hunchback is a refuge to the park, but he is also a refuge to his mind, he longs for an escape from the world, but also from his own mind. The nameless hunchback wants to establish his identity in the park while “dodging the the park keeper with his stick that picked up leaves.” Although the hunchback is trying to abolish his deformed identity, he avoids being dumped in the rubbish by the park keeper, because his soul reveals much more about his character than his deformity ever

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