The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013

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Symbols & Motifs

The Line

The Line, a symbol of progress and glory for the Japanese, is also a source of misery for the POWs: “The POWs refer to the slow descent into madness that followed simply with two words: the Line” (25). For the POWs, the long walk to the line offers sights of corpses and destruction. At the line, the men must perform grueling labor and endure beatings from their captors. To the Japanese, an unbroken line is a plan successfully executed as well as the literal idea of progress with respect to the railway. However, according to Dorrigo, every line breaks, and all lives end. When the Japanese abandon the railway, Dorrigo details the significance: “For the Line was broken, as all lines finally are; it was all for nothing, and of it nothing remained. People kept on longing for meaning and hope, but the annals of the past are a muddy story of chaos only” (270). Dorrigo acknowledges that the suffering in the camp was meaningless. Throughout the narrative, the Line represents oppression and hopelessness for the POWs. Dorrigo understands that while others may strive to find meaning in what happened at the Line, the chaotic nature of war and life itself ends with death, regardless of what men try to make of it.

The Crimson Flower

When Dorrigo meets Amy in the bookstore, she is wearing a red flower in her hair. This flower captivates him, even though it looks out of place. When he sees the red flower in the mud on the evening after he chose the 100 men for the march, it looks equally out of place. It is growing out of the mud in a place of death, cholera, and torture. The flower reminds him of Amy, and how improbable and unusual their first meeting was. It is the sight of the flower in the camp that allows his memories of Amy to sustain him, even after he believes she has died. The sight of something growing, despite the improbability of the flower existing in the camp, is one of the novel’s few optimistic moments that does not come from Darky Gardiner. In the moments preceding his death, Dorrigo thinks again of Amy’s flower, the only signifier of hope throughout his life.

Poetry

When Amy asks why Dorrigo likes words so much, he says that words were “the first beautiful thing [he] ever knew” (14). He expresses this love by reading and reciting poetry. This extends to Tennyson’s epic poem Ulysses and allows Dorrigo to cast himself as the wandering Ulysses and Ella as Penelope. Poetry allows Dorrigo to impose a type of order on a chaotic world. When Sato talks about the game of “Go,” he says “there is a pattern and structure to all things. Only we can’t see it. Our job is to discover that pattern and structure and work within it, as part of it” (313). This is similar to the attraction Dorrigo feels for poetry. It is always beautiful to him, even when there is no other beauty to be found. Poetry never changes for him. At his death, it is the death poem of Shisui that he recalls.

The Bugle

Jimmy Bigelow, a fellow POW, plays “Last Post” at the funeral services the POWs hold for fallen comrades. Jimmy continues this tradition, even as his rapidly deteriorating health and swollen lips stifle his ability to do so. Despite the harsh conditions of the jungle camp, Jimmy’s bugle “was the only thing that seemed impervious to decay and rot” (215). The instrument’s use—to honor the dead—will never fall out of practice in times of war. Jimmy holds onto his bugle, a symbol of his desire to become a musician, even after the war. Long after he has abandoned this dream, as an old man, the bugle remains one of his only possessions, signifying his inability to fully escape the horrors of war. Only in death is Jimmy fully freed of the memories of war, and after his passing, his daughter places the old bugle in the pile of garage sale items, its significance no longer relevant.