Week 1: “Strangers” and Alienation

     The “Strangers” section reinforces the varying themes of separation and alienation throughout the novel’s historical context. There is separation between class, foreign groups, language— even just the workers at Thornhill’s rowing job shows a hierarchy of some sort. Even before meeting the aboriginal Australian man, the despair felt by Thornhill “under these alien stars, his bones rot in this cold earth” (Grenville 4) features a separation between his life where he grew up and this foreign land he is essentially sentenced to die in. When he meets the aboriginal man, the first thing Thornhill takes note of is his dark skin, which “swallowed the light and made him not quite real, something only imagined” (5). Thornhill has never seen anybody like this, and between the spear, mutual confusion, and language barrier, he immediately goes on the defensive and begins deterring the man like he would a dog, or even a monster, as he tells him to “go to the devil!” (5). This alienation and harsh collision of two worlds drives the historical and social context of The Secret River.

Comments

  1. AnonymousJanuary 16, 2023 at 11:31 PM

    This is an interesting analysis of the prologue. As I just mentioned on Gema's blog post, the narrator even describes the Aboriginal man's behavior as animalistic, saying that his shouting was "a kindof madness, as if a dog were to bark in English" (6). The author blatantly references the barriers between the two men and the consequences of this that it is almost has comedic value to me.

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