The Secret River Essay

Belonging occurs when privates understand the people and the world rough them. How is this observable in two of the texts you have studied? Belonging, that is, the connection an respective(prenominal) feels to the world he or she inhabits often add ups down to the specific factors and forces that regulate their experience. In the text The Secret River, author Kate Grenville illuminates a number of tell issues in regard to belong, none of these to a greater extent poignant that place, location and venue often functions as a light upon determinant of be.This concept of belong is also highlighted in Shaun Tans pictorial narrative, The stretch, in which the sizeableness of home and family and the perceive of harmony and happiness that comes with understanding relationships with the people we love. The determinants of be vary depending on an exclusive and their views and experiences ones sense of be may come down to who they are with without the location be a factor, wher e they are situated and the somatogenic environmental features and ones culture and traditions.These varying determinants of ones belonging are confronted in The Secret River and The Arrival in which to each one booster amplifier has different approaches to their humorl conclusion of belonging. Australian author Kate Grenvilles 2005 novel, The Secret River, explores the concept that place and geographical context and circumstance entrust often play a key role in determine ones belonging. The opening pages of the novel introduce William Thornhill, a convict, transported to bleak South Wales in the year 1806.Thornhills journey tells of the great physical distance that now separates Thornhill from the warm familiarity of feel at home in capital of the United Kingdom Thornhills new-made world is foreign, inhospitable place, disorientating in its new(prenominal)ness, and becomes a metonym for the great yearning Thornhill now has for his erstwhile life in England. To hold this idea of ones understanding and contact with their world being a determinant to their sense of belonging, Grenville wasting diseases a number of techniques such as hyperbole and simile.Grenvilles third person narrator describes the Alexander, Thornhills ship, as having fetched up at the end of the Earth. This hyperbole creates an painting unassailable distance, of opposite extremity and in so doing dramatizes the concept of distance which, in turn, comes to represent Thornhills alienation from the world he knows and loves. Grenville uses figurative language to wager into focus her main character William Thornhills bond paper t, and ultimate equipment failure from the two places he calls home A New South Wales penal colony, and London. London and the thoughts are represented in the simile, as intimate to him as breathing.In this case, the simile takes the idea of breathing which is both natural to us and essential to our being. This idea of intimacy then extends to Thornhil ls essential attachment to home and his understanding and recognition of its world. Like breathing itself, Thornhills London life is a giving force. When it comes to describing Thornhills antipathy to his new life in New South Wales, Grenvilles simile describes a disconnect, a non-relationship. Whereas Thornhill is closely familiar with the London night sky in his new life the stars are meaningless as spilt rice.This simile neatly captures Thornhills disorientation. The image of split rice suggests something both random and accidental. This reflects his ablaze alienation of moving and not belonging in his new world. The idea that one must understand and be familiar with their environment and its individual traits that are only recognisable and known if you have a private sense of belonging to our world. One of the main ideas that emerges In Shaun Tans, The Arrival is that belonging is often influenced and stipulationd by family and the personal intimacies family offers.Tan devel ops this theme through the use of a number of specific visual devices. In chapter one of the narrative Tan describes a situation where the husband of the family whole must leave his family for another, distant nation. Tan stresses the importation of family through the use of vectoring and shot size. Tan presents a close up shot of the father-daughter throw clasp emphasising not only the physical bond that unites the family but the emotional connectedness they share. The hand clasp is effectively a metaphor for connectedness and the close up emphasises the significance of family.In addition to this Tan uses vectoring. hygienic vectors direct the reader to the hand clasp which is positioned precisely at the sharpen of the page this key placement of the image then becomes a metonym for the central significance and place of family in the fathers life To further accentuate the significance of family in determining belonging, Tan again employs shot size in a subsequent image, the han d clasp is replaced by a impoverished hand-clasp, the close up and the tiny interstice that now separates the hands becomes a key signifier of the separation the ather must now endure. The belonging once evident in the intimacy of the hand clasp is replaced with the separation and the emptiness of the upturned embrace. As a final and consolidating reminder of the fathers separation from family, Tan uses and natural close long shot of the fathers departing train. the train is a remote presence on the horizon, the horizon itself a symbol of distance.The fastball physicality of earlier imagery is now replaced with the distant train, visible more as a puff of soon to be extinct grass on the horizon- thus the once tangible presence of the family is replaced with the immaterial image of a train quickly travelling past the sight of the eye. The dividing line demonstrates the obvious way in which the understanding family members have with each other results in a strong sense of belongi ng.Once separation takes place- belonging itself starts to fade, and an individual must than consider the effects of alienation and unfamiliarity. Belonging, that is, the connection an individual feels to the world he or she inhabits often comes down to the specific factors that shape their experience. Ones world is made up of their individual cultures, location, experiences, familiarity, relationships and environments.This idea is represented in The Arrival and The Secret River, in which each protagonists sense of belonging comes down to several of these factors of belonging. For some, time depart result in a once unknown and alienated sense or place, to a comfortable and evolving feeling inhabited by an individual, and for others, belonging is concrete mindset in which they need to experience the sense of belonging.