The Burma Railway Dorrigo Evans Analysis

The heart of the novel is its depiction of the suffering and death of the Australians condemned with the impossible task of building the Thai-Burma Railway. Through Dorrigo Evans, an Australian POW turned national legend, and the myriad of loosely connected characters, Flanagan transforms the story of two star-crossed lovers into a historic and informative piece of the procedures in POW camps in Japan. He provides a unique outlook on the experiences faced by the approximate 35 million military personnel that spent time in enemy hands from 1939 through to 1945. There was an estimated total of sixteen thousand from forty thousand prisoners that died working on the railway as a result of disease, malnutrition, overwork and murder. Flanagan has represented this magnificently through the

The day’s events began by describing the exhaustion faced by each prisoner shown through Darky Gardiner, as he passed out on the jungle track on his way to the day’s work, and the eight men who had abandoned their duties to hide in the jungle for a day of rest that the Japanese would not allow them to have. It moves on and the disease-ridden camp is described, detailing the stench of the hospitals – which were full of patients suffering diseases ranging from cholera to tropic ulcers to gangrene – as “redolent to anchovy paste and shit” and likening the sight of the bodies to mangrove roots. Furthermore, the lack of proper medical supplies and equipment is shown through the operation on Jack Rainbow’s leg, performed by Dorrigo Evans, using a collection of materials found around the camp such as a kitchen meat saw to cut through the bone, a spoon which was used to apply pressure to control bleeding, and the intestine of a pig which was cleaned, boiled and pared into threads used as stitches for the wound. Moreover, Darky Gardiner with his near beheading by Colonel Kota and beating by the Goanna, a Korean guard, expose the inhumane brutality and sheer callousness of the Japanese