Mental Illness In Elliot Moss's 'I Can' T Swim

“I Can’t Swim” by Elliot Moss composed in 2015 outlines mental illness in a lyrical way. Throughout the song, the narrator illustrates how mental illness has affected their overall wellbeing. The mental illness being illustrated within the song is depression and enables the listener to comprehend that depression is not constantly displayed outwardly. Hence, allowing the listener to see that within one’s mind there is a great internal conflict due to depression. Elliot Moss’s lyrics to “I Can’t Swim” utilizes personification, repetition, and allusion to convey the internal conflict of mental illness which decreases overall wellbeing of the victim. Elliot Moss has made the speaker of the song to be suffering from their depression. The narrator speaks defeatedly towards their depression, who is consequently their antagonist. The defeated tone is formed from their depression, which is creating excessive internal conflict the outside world cannot view. One-way Elliot Moss illustrates the conflict is by a figurate river which carries him downstream. Then, the speaker states, “Here comes the part where I drown” (“I Can’t Swim”, Elliot Moss) as their river became too much to handle. This line expresses the wellbeing of the speaker is under enormous pain as …show more content…
By personifying the depression allows depression to be a tangible idea for the listener, thus allowing improved understanding of speaker’s agony. Particularly, the line “You pushed one at the end” (“I Can’t Swim”, Elliot Moss) personifies depression because the speaker is referring ‘you’ to their depression. Then earlier within the same verse, the speaker was standing up dominoes, which are his thoughts. Therefore, expressing their depression ruining the thoughts organized by the victim. When the speaker loses control over his thoughts, they are unable to better himself and ultimately loses control of