Prentice's Funeral Tradition In 'The Crow Road'
COMMENTARY: The Crow Road
The passage recounts the funeral ceremony of Prentice’s –main character-grandmother .The passage describes the general atmosphere in the crematorium and Prentice’s reaction to the situation.Bank’s writing has a significant amount of description of the characters and the situation, thus grabbing the reader’s attention .
He puts more care in physically describing the characters, noticeably Prentice’s father “His brown greying brown head was massive above his tweed jacket”, his mother “upright and trim neatly filling a black coat and sporting a dramatic black hat shaped like a flying saucer”, his younger brother “ fiddling with his single earring” . Moreover he describes Aunt Antonia’s ball of pink- rinse hair above the bulk of her black coat”. These descriptions are not only physical but also imply personality such as the father’s reaction to the religious music Prentice’s grandmother had chosen for her funeral. Bank tries to get the reader’s sympathy for the dead women when …show more content…
It is quite clear that there is much awkwardness to the ceremony .Bank portrays Prentice’s nervousness and his relationship with his late grandmother by including some flashbacks. The flashback which brings most insight is Prentice’s indecision to the choice of clothing as he says “I intended to wear the black pair under my nine-eye Docs with the twin ankle buckles”. When Prentice says” the boots were wrong”, it is not just the boots that were wrong but they are a reflection of a greater ‘wrong’. The particular attention Prentice gives to the choice of clothing for the ceremony illustrates the importance of the event to him. The second flashback which is much shorter,” I remembered the day six months earlier, when I had pushed, when I had pushed old Margot out of the house…” strongly evident the sadness that Prentice feels for this
The passage recounts the funeral ceremony of Prentice’s –main character-grandmother .The passage describes the general atmosphere in the crematorium and Prentice’s reaction to the situation.Bank’s writing has a significant amount of description of the characters and the situation, thus grabbing the reader’s attention .
He puts more care in physically describing the characters, noticeably Prentice’s father “His brown greying brown head was massive above his tweed jacket”, his mother “upright and trim neatly filling a black coat and sporting a dramatic black hat shaped like a flying saucer”, his younger brother “ fiddling with his single earring” . Moreover he describes Aunt Antonia’s ball of pink- rinse hair above the bulk of her black coat”. These descriptions are not only physical but also imply personality such as the father’s reaction to the religious music Prentice’s grandmother had chosen for her funeral. Bank tries to get the reader’s sympathy for the dead women when …show more content…
It is quite clear that there is much awkwardness to the ceremony .Bank portrays Prentice’s nervousness and his relationship with his late grandmother by including some flashbacks. The flashback which brings most insight is Prentice’s indecision to the choice of clothing as he says “I intended to wear the black pair under my nine-eye Docs with the twin ankle buckles”. When Prentice says” the boots were wrong”, it is not just the boots that were wrong but they are a reflection of a greater ‘wrong’. The particular attention Prentice gives to the choice of clothing for the ceremony illustrates the importance of the event to him. The second flashback which is much shorter,” I remembered the day six months earlier, when I had pushed, when I had pushed old Margot out of the house…” strongly evident the sadness that Prentice feels for this