George Bernard Shaw And His Short Story About The Cremation Of The Narrators

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Term Paper Title	George Bernard Shaw And His Short Story About The Cremation Of The Narrators
# of Words	733
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	2.93

George Bernard Shaw and His Short Story About the Cremation of The Narrator's
Mother

George Bernard Shaw and His Short Story About the Cremation of The Narrator's
Mother

     In a written exerpt from a letter about the cremation of his mother,
George Bernard Shaw recalls her “passage” with humor and understanding.  The
dark humor associated with the horrid details of disposing of his mother's
physical body are eventually reconciled with an understanding that her spirit
lives on.  He imagines how she would find humor in the bizarre event of her own
cremation.  The quality of humor unites Shaw and his mother in a bond that
transcends the event of death and helps Shaw understand that her spirit will
never die.  The reader is also released from the horror of facing the mechanics
of the cremation process when “Mama's” own comments lead us to understand that
her personality and spirit will live on.
     Shaw's diction is effective in conveying his mood and dramatizing the
process of cremation.  The traditional words of a burial service “ashes to ashes,
dust to dust” are not altered for the cremation, the interior chamber “looked
cool, clean, and sunny” as by a graveside, and the coffin was presented “feet
first” as in a ground burial.  In selecting aspects of a traditional burial
service, Shaw's mood is revealed as ambivalent toward cremation by imposing
recalled fragments of ground burial for contrast.  Strangely fascinated, he
begins to wonder exactly what happens when one is cremated.  This mood of awe is
dramatized as he encounters several doors to observe in his chronological
investigation.  He sees “a door opened in the wall,” and follows the coffin as
it “passed out through it and vanished as it closed,” but this is not “the door
of the furnace.”  He finds the coffin “opposite another door, a real
unmistakable furnace door,” but as the coffin became engulfed in flame, ”the
door fell” and the mystery only continues an hour later as he gazes “through an
opening in the floor.”  As he observes two “cooks” picking through “Mama's
dainty little heap of ashes and samples of bone” the mood of dark humor is the
only way he can handle the horror of his mother's death and cremated body.  He
has remained an unemotional observer on a journey through the crematorium wit...

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