COMMENTARY: Kylie Tennant's The Battlers

This excerpt from Kylie Tennant's The Battlers is an imagery-rich characterization of Snow, a man returning to his family. Set in Australia, Tennant's work evokes the vastness and beauty of the country, both the destructive and nurturing ways of nature towards man. Through setting, Tennant also characterizes Snow, the main character of this excerpt. The diction of simile, onomatopoeia, metaphor, and personification melopoetically develops Tennant as a character who is apparently more comfortably a part of the world of nature than of man. Conflict is foreshadowed, but this excerpt intertwines setting and characterization to produce anticipation of what is to come and a sympathy for this man despite his apparent waywardness.

The first sentence of the passage is a negative hypotheses which, using a foreboding tone, establishes that the following text will be a flashback. The "If...would have" construction of the first sentence shows that Snow's life has just changed irrevocably. As in Robert Frost's "Two roads diverged" poem, Snow has just chosen a literal road that has precipitated change for his whole life. Tennant creates suspense through this. She follows this by elaborating on the event through flashback, but leaves unexplained the outcome of the choice of the track over the road. I predict that whatever has taken place will change Snow's homecoming from what he expects it to be like. "Snow was not any too eager to reach home" is given as the reason for his decision to take the longer route (l.4). Tennant's use of litotes is effective in emphasizing how, contrary to what one might expect, this prodigal father's homecoming is "never the scene of wild enthusiasm" (l.5). Tennant subtly characterizes Snow through the reactions of others, albeit from times prior to this one. The lack of enthusiasm is clear in the son's "Hey, Mum, Dad's here," which lacks the diction of joy or surprise, and in the wife's "grimly" said "Hello! so you're back, are you?" (7) which likewise lacks the positive diction of welcome and is also distinctive in the lack of any physical welcome. I conclude that this husband and father has been away much of the time or that Snow has alienated is family in some way through his behavior, but that this time, the manner of his homecoming will be significantly changed.

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That Snow is an alienated man is suggested by the Australian setting which Tennant describes in paragraph 2. The "black-soil" of the plain sets a bleak tone which is continued in the "loneliness" that characterizes the plain where "mirages smoke," kangaroos "leap away," telephone poles "dwindle" and then "disappear" (l.9-10). These verbs add to the sense that this man is characterized by distance. The simile "baked like a tile" adds a hard quality to both setting and man. The negative diction of "black bog," the alliteration of "drovers dread," followed by "crawled slowly," the "lumbering van" and the "slow" ...

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