Journey Skrzynecki Analysis

Good afternoon everyone. Today I will be talking to you about what I’ve learned about the concept of Journey and while there are many elements to this topic, I am going to talk about how a physical journey often initiates an inner one.. Evidence to support this is demonstrated in ‘Postcard’ and ‘Feliks Skrzynecki by Peter Skrzynecki, ‘ Thelma and Louise’ a film by Ridley Scott and screenplay by Callie Khouri and in Buried child’ by Sam Shepard.

Everyone undertakes journeys, whether it’s being outlaws in a patriarchal society, driving to the store to get your father a ‘take away’, a polish migrant living in Australia or a sixteen year old girl having to make a speech… As i am right now being forced to take on this physical journey in the form

Through out the poem the hardship of travelling from Europe to Australia is shown to have impacted both father and son, albeit it in dif ferent ways.The poem also gives the reader insight into the struggles migrants go through deciding which memories and culture to keep, and which ones to discard. An example of the different inner journies caused by the same physical journey is in Stanhza 6 of this poem where we see the father and sons’ starkly different realities. “ Stumbling over tenses in Caesar’s Gallic War, / I forgot my first Polish word. / He repeated it so I never forgot. / After that, like a dumb prophet / Watched me pegging my tents / Further and further south of Hadrian’s wall”. These words tell the reader that Peter is moving into his new world and onto a new journey different from his paternal heritage. The final stanza reveals the inevitability of this loss by using the ‘hadrian wall’ as a metaphor to express the fact that Felkis’s son will move even further away from his heritage into a new land. And although this has positive outcomes, it is also clear that the father and his “‘tended’ garden reveals how he is less lost in some ways than his

Unlike both the Skrzynecki poems and Thelma and Louise, Vince’s physical journey isn’t a long and hard endeavour across a great of time and space. It is an everyday event, one he’d done numerous times before. The play's themes focus on the American dream, alcoholism, abuse and economic hardship. In this text the protagonist, Vince needs to make a decision to fight or flight. The events leading up to the monologue involve Vince coming home with his ‘hottie’ (girl-friend) only to find his dysfunctional family living on a farm where everything is dying (literally and symbolically). When surprisingly none of the family recognise Vince, more problems arise and they relate to a buried child (killed by the grandparents) Vince then realises the true dysfunction and conflict in his family when his alcoholic father yells an order at him to buy alcohol with his two ‘bucks’. This realisation causes Vince to ‘take off’ with the hope to just keep on running and never