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HUNCHBACK IN THE PARK ANALYSIS
Hello, welcome to another tutorial video. Just before I get into the meat of this one
I’d like to point out a couple of things on the Channel page. First of all I’ve set
up a Facebook page so you can share this quite easily with your friends if you think something’s
of use. Secondly I’ve actually set up a Twitter account so you can ask me things publicly
rather than through messages. That makes it a lot easier for me a) to reply to you and
b) it’s always there for people to actually look back over questions asked and answers,
rather than them being private once. And also, most importantly, I’ve actually put a list
of all the WCS tutorials that I’ve done, so if you click on that, you will actually
see a list of everything. I’ve split it into literature, poetry and language and I’m
going to be adding to them daily. Currently I do a lot of my focus on AQA but I’m going
to start doing a lot more OCR stuff. If there’s anything else that you want to see added,
etc., then just get in touch via any of those modes of communication and we’ll see what
I can do.
Hello. So we look now at ‘The Hunchback in the Park’ and we’re going to go through
it with SMILE and just before I go into this one I should say that the 15 or so points
that I’ve put here are just kind of the tip of the iceberg on this poem. There are
hundreds of things you could write about this, it’s very, very complex and in fact there’s
even one part I’m still not 100% sure what I think actually happens in it, so I’ll
get into it when I come to it. So anything that you want to add and obviously put on,
as with any of these videos, just please put it on in the comments section, especially
if you’ve come across a conclusion or someone in your class did, or your teacher did, etc.,
etc., etc., then please share it and put it up for other people top hopefully benefit
from.
So we start then with the structure and first of all we look at all the enjambment all the
way through. The lines just run on and on and on and there’s very rarely used punctuation
and that gives us the idea of the freedom. And the freedom or reflection here is obviously
the freedom that one should have in a park, perhaps the youth of the boys and moreover
the freedom of the imagination that people have. First of all in the boy in the park
we’re seeing everything that goes around him and how he references things and obviously
the imagination in the boys as they’re kind of laughing at the hunchback, perhaps thinking
him an ogre or some kind of (excuse the phrase) ‘boogie monster’, or the actual hunchback
himself when he’s actually thinking about the woman that he wants, this woman with a
straight back.
We’ve got the different voices as well. All those three things that I just referenced
are still important, that’s really important in the structure because it’s not actually
their ‘voices’ in terms of us hearing them, but obviously we get kind of a view
of what they’re thinking and that’s really important obviously because we’ve got the
boy feeling this kind of strange connection, or at least empathy for the hunchback. We’ve
got the boys obviously thinking him something of intrigue, something to chase and mock and
we’ve got the man as well with his thoughts and his dreams and what kind of life he wishes
for himself.
Again it’s reflected in the shape of the actual stanzas because they’re all similar
length; I think they’re all six apart from one which is five, and then they all have
different length lines; which again conjures up freeness of the imagination or just the
fact that anything can happen or your imagination can go as far as it wants.
So some of the meanings then. We get the idea of the loneliness and the isolation that comes
through, first of all because he’s the ‘Hunchback in the Park’, that’s his name, he’s
not actually given any kind of personage or any kind of title apart from that, so again
it just shows he’s something on his own, obviously the fact that he’s solitary there
again and also the fact that he lives here, number two, and there was one more thing that
I wanted to point out about that; the idea of him obviously like kind of the only person
that he does have is this person that he has in his dreams. So that isolation and loneliness
really comes through. And obviously the boy, he’s got his own little bit of isolation
as well, where he plays with the boat on his own, so you can actually say that there’s
a connection between them in their isolation and their loneliness, etc., and obviously
the hunchback is doubly isolated because of his disability.
The idea of identifying then, and that’s identifying in terms of making a connection
as the young boy does with the hunchback, but then also with the just identifying something
and then the labelling of it. So as the boys actually label the guy with this name, everyone’s
labelled him as the hunchback, etc., because of the actual disability, so you can think
of the idea of identifying and labelling there.
Obviously you’ve got the power of imagination. The boys thinking he’s an ogre – as I’ve
actually mentioned before – and obviously the woman that comes out from the hunchback’s
imagination, etc.
Then we’ve got a lot of things actually – I should have split these all up because
they’re not actually that similar – but there were just lots of points to actually
think about here. You know, the hunchback is actually in the park but he’s kind of
like a captive in this free place. This should be a place where everyone runs free literally
and then runs free with their imagination and although he can run free with his imagination,
the running he does – if you’ll take this line here as him running – the running he
does is away from the boys and second of all, away from the park keeper, because obviously
the park keeper will kick him out. So in a way he’s trapped, but in a way he’s in
the most free place, but then again his imagination’s free, so it kind of really brings in the idea
of what makes a person free? Because obviously he’s captive as well by his disability,
perhaps people won’t give him as much time and respect as they should, perhaps on a romantic
level especially because of his disability.
We’ve also got this really interesting – in fact I definitely have to make this one something
different – we’ve got this other idea here and this is the quality that comes through
quite a lot, of him being animalistic, not only because he sleeps in what’s referenced
as a dog kennel in the basin and obviously he’s up really early with the birds when
he actually comes into the place and then he’s moving around like an animal that’s
being chased as well when he’s dodging the park keeper, etc., so you get all those kind
of things. And again, the reference to the locks, etc., and the chains that we had earlier
and all of it is kind of keeping him in place, so it’s kind of animalistic and obviously
his life in a way is very base and that’s also seen by the way he eats and drinks; he’s
just drinking from a public cup and just eating out of a newspaper and obviously he’s eating
very simple food. So it’s all kind of ties into an animalistic reference to him. And
that obviously ties into the isolation, he’s a Caliban of such almost, he’s kind of a
creature on the outskirts even though he has all the same human feelings, etc., as anyone
else. And that’s probably a really good line or bent to actually take if you can justify
it, or obviously if it’s relevant to your essay, etc.
So the images we have. Everything that you can have from a park. You’ve got the idea
of the fun, of the boys wild playing, you’ve got the idea of the shelter because the hunchback
is here for an actual reason and there’s some kind of sustenance for him there even
if it’s just the water and obviously that’s his refuge to an idea. And the idea of it
being boundless, because the boys can run around and have all the space to themselves
and the boundlessness of the imagination etc.
And then when we actually ask ourselves what the park is actually home to and not only
kind of literally in terms of the animals that come there like the birds mentioned,
but also the home to the kind of ideas and what actually happens there. So really a park
is a great place for seeing different peoples’ lives, like families walking through or joggers
of cyclists, etc., etc., etc. So it’s home to that kind of people viewing, which is exactly
what the young person has actually gone to do there or at least it’s what he’s reporting
to us in this instance.
What other images do we get? We get a lot of images, obviously pictures built in our
mind that don’t actually just mean a literal picture here, but obviously the sounds that
come through. We have laughing, we have running, we have the bell and the bell obviously with
reference to the hunchback, obviously the reference to the Hunchback of Notre Dame,
Quasimodo, the idea being that that’s one person that kind of overcame something and
he had his love – in the cartoon, not released in this story – and then this person here,
the only way he can kind of get his love is in his dreams and then that again brings us
the idea of this isolation and this loneliness; not being able to identify with that character
completely even though he has a character trait, but he doesn’t get the love of someone
that Quasimodo actually gets.
And then the image of the woman. This is really quite sad and simple and obviously the tone
of sadness if all the way through the poem. The idea it’s just a woman without fault.
He doesn’t highlight anything kind of grand or special about her, ‘her eyes aren’t
diamonds, her hair isn’t silk’ or whatever else, she’s just straight and she can just
stand properly and she can stand, almost as if she’d stand with him, be by his side
and that’s what’s really important to him and again, it just kind of shows us the
limitation he’s kind of set on himself or what he actually what he wants, which is again
really said.
In the language then we’ve got the similes, again just to kind of give us the idea about
the way the hunchback ties to nature. Again like the birds and again, that can have a
double meaning, not only just saying like he physically comes to the park but also in
the fact that he has the freedom of the birds with his imagination.
We have the reference of ‘mister’, the fact that he’s often called mister and when
they call him mister, it’s just that namelessness – here we go and there’s that mister again
– that namelessness is really interesting because again it just shows how isolated and
how on the edge of society he is.
Then we’ve got the idea of the double entendre, and obviously a lot of people look at that
to only mean that the second meaning is always a *** reference; it doesn’t always mean
that, it just means two meanings and it just happens to be that a lot of them do have a
*** reference after it. And that was what I wanted to point out to you with the ‘wild
boys’, obviously ‘the wild boys innocent as strawberries’, so that’s got two meanings
in terms of the boys are kind of like wild in their behaviour, they’re just mocking
a stranger, maybe not very well raised to do that, but then at the same time they’re
just kind of wild, they’re just kind of running free and obviously he references them
here as innocent, so they’re just doing what young boys do. But then again when he
says they’re wild as strawberries, and obviously as everyone knows strawberries can be really
bitter or really sweet. So again, they have those two things, they can just be either
way, so maybe that ‘wild boys as innocent as strawberries’, strawberries aren’t
to blame for their taste and actually whether it’s good or bad, it’s just the way they
are. So you can look at that that way.
What have we got here? Obviously then the language here, even though we’ve got this
man is isolated, I just find it quite strange that he’s actually referred to as ‘dodging
the park keeper’. With the kind of description around the man or the description around someone
who’s kind of more mature you’d expect it to be ‘he alluded’ or ‘he avoided’
but here we’ve got ‘dodging’, so we’ve got his own childlike action that he does,
or maybe this is just showing the age and the voice of the narrator, that he can only
kind of reference it with those words, the ‘dodging’. So again, it’s interesting.
And then you’ve got the idea in the language of the lock and chain and obviously what they
mean, not just physically in terms of being in the park; so here we are ‘chained him
up’, for example. That’s interesting in and of itself just because it closes him up
there, but more importantly it’s also talking about the limitations, etc., that are on him
in life because of his disability, etc., and obviously because he doesn’t have the finance
we presume, to actually live a better life. So again, there’s like several layers you
can link it to there.
So what does it make us think about? Well it makes us think about the situation of disabled
for one. Just thinking about the situation that someone would be in without the kind
of support and the kind of network around them to actually make that better and perhaps
this isn’t set in a – it doesn’t sound like it’s set in a – kind of large city,
etc., obviously Dylan Thomas was from Wales – I can’t remember exactly where from
– but he’d probably be talking more about smaller communities rather than larger communities,
so maybe this was just kind of how things were, there weren’t many things in place
to actually look after people and that’s one thing you can look at. But again, it’s
the situation of the disabled that we look at.
The other idea is how we free ourselves. It’s just the imagination and what we actually
want to do to try and make our own situations better, perhaps the power of daydreams, etc.,
but then obviously you could extend that and look at the bitterness of reality. Does he
dream every night of this woman and that kind of makes him happy and then wakes up every
morning and realises it’s not true and that kind of makes him more bitter, and that keeps
him down? You can extend that if you wish.
And then here we have the idea of the peace we have in nature and that kind of comes around
because everyone’s there to enjoy nature. So you’ve obviously got the boys running
round and all the freedom and all the space, you’ve got the young Dylan Thomas looking
around, seeing all the things and obviously just coming to kind of an appreciation of
it in a way and obviously the hunchback always goes there because maybe until the boys come,
he actually has a kind of peace there and it’s some kind of haven for him.
But as I said before, you could add millions, it’s very, very complex this one, so there’s
millions of things you can add and I hope that was useful – please add!
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