Throughout the excerpt, the author begins his oration in an admirable tone. The author portrays his attitude towards his mother’s cremation as a positive outlook in life. With the excessive usage of diction, the author describes what lies beyond the oven door of the crematory oven as “wonderful”, while other people sought it as horrifying to see it. Shaw describes the oven being “No roaring draught. No flame. No fuel.”; rather, with the appearance of “cool, clean, sunny” of the coffin. Shaw evokes a sense of diction that is viewed with full of life. The cremation is depicted as a “beautiful fire” like “pentecostal tongue” suggests the mother as a spirit ascending from the coffin with the rebirth of life itself. By the presentation of diction use with the mother being rebirthed with attribution of new life, the author’s attitude can be best described in a blissful manner.
Although Shaw describes the rebirth of his mother with the excessive usage of diction, he also attributes the cremation with vivid detail of imagery. Shaw’s usage of imagery with his mother’s cremation gives the reader an insight of the author’s attitude towards his mother. When Shaw describes the coffin of “streaming ribbons of garnet colored lovely flame, smokeless and eager, like pentecostal tongues”, his view of imagery suggests fire is a symbol of life and that there is a spirit ascending from the coffin. Shaw also notes his “mother became that beautiful fire,” before the cook “swept her up into a sieve and shook her out: so that there was a heap of dust and a heap of bone straps,” makes the imagery that Shaw