Critical Response The Narrow Road To The Deep North By Flanagan

I was first intrigued by Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, due to the focus of the story being on the Thai-Burma Railway (or the Death Railway as it was also called) during World War II (WWII). This setting interested me as I have always had a curiosity about history and the study of history. Similarly I was also interested in the Thai-Burma Railway as last year I had done a project on it in my history class. However as I started reading the novel, the setting became less important to me and instead I was more interested in the way in which heroes were created and how society defined and shaped people. This was particularly interesting for me, with both Nakamura and Dorrigo illustrating the power of which society can create both good and evil within people. So for my Critical Response I decided to focus on these ideas of the power of society in shaping and determining the character of people.

When I was writing my critical response I was further …show more content…
Through the novel I was forced to consider these hardships, specifically through some of the powerful scenes in the novel such as when Dorrigo had to amputate the limb of a man with a sharpened spoon. This horror allowed me to reassess the pain and horror that war elicits in and through people. As I am from a Christian background both in family and in my schooling many of those moral values which have been instilled in me from a young age, were impacted in my reading of the text. This is specifically through Dorrigo as he is both someone who upholds some of these traditional values which are expected of a hero, but also he is someone who fails these same values through his love life. In this way I was forced to reassess what a hero is in society and what a good man is compared to what I would expect from my Christian