The Glass Jar Analysis

Discoveries deepen our understandings of ourselves and the world and have a transformative effect on those who discover. In William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, and Gwen Harwood’s poem ‘The Glass Jar’, the authors use the characterisation of main characters in their texts to explore the ways in which discovery affects people and how it changes their perspectives, leading to deeper and broader understandings of themselves and their worlds. The characters of the boy in ‘The Glass Jar’ and Miranda in The Tempest are important in the exploration of the effects of discovery and how it enables people to change in relation to their environments and understandings of self. Together, the texts create a picture of the way in which discovery can affect
The boy, upon discovering the nature of sex, has his perceptions of the world deepened, but negatively affected. He is changed greatly by the discovery which “no child could read or realise. Once more” Harwood uses caesura to amplify and explore the effects of shock on the boy by halting the flow of the sentence. This line explores how difficult the discovery is for the boy to fully understand, as well as how it has transformed him from child, to a person who is no longer blinded by childish innocence. This discovery challenges the boy’s self-identity in a way which gives him new understandings of self, but also has a detrimental effect on his self-image. Harwood writes “to bed and to worse dreams he went”, using symbolism of dreams to explore how the boy’s discovery has brought his identity to a place where rather than help him, it has hurt him. His nightmares were the motivator behind his discovery, and now that he has discovered, his understanding of self and self-confidence has been eroded so deeply that he suffers from worse nightmares. The boy in ‘The Glass Jar’ is negatively affected by his discovery, but the events after his revelation are important in demonstrating how these discoveries deepen one’s understanding of oneself and relation to the