Fly Buzz Flashcards
Key themes
Religion, death, sensory failure, life after death
Explain ‘when I died’
Implies existence beyond death
Explain ‘between the heaves of storm’
Implies struggle in dying process, probably painful for the speaker
Exp. ‘The eyes/breaths’
Synecdoche for people-strips them of their identity as they watch the speaker die. (Dehumanising)
Could be part of sensory shut down as vision fails
Exp. ‘For that last onset’
Oxymoronic and paradoxical (impl. Ending and beginning) maybe the ending is of life and the beginning is of new life.
‘When the king/be witnessed’
Direct religious reference to god, implying that he’s waiting for speaker to die. -the gathered people may be waiting for his revelation (could be subversive as king never comes)
Expl. ‘Signed away/what potion of me be/ assignable’
Stripping down of life. Dehumanising
Expl. ‘There interposed a fly’
Interposed shows that the fly is getting in the way of the process of dying. This is bathos in terms of undermining the importance of the dying process (the fly is present but god isn’t) -apostasy?
Expl. ‘Blue uncertain stumbling buzz’
Synaesthesia demonstrates a merging of the senses as they come close to failing completely.
Expl. ‘Between the light and me’
Is the fly getting between the speaker and heaven? Is the ‘light’ the mythical light that we refer to at the end of the tunnel?
Expl. ‘And then the windows failed and I could not see to see’
Puts moment of death in offensively but illustrates the dying process as painless and easy. Lack of a full stop implies lack of finality in death but the window shutting shows that there is no return to life as we know it.
Explain the chiasmus
Creates boundaries in the experience of dying, showing that the speaker is trapped by the Process.
Key techniques
Chiasmus, bathos, synecdoche, synaesthesia
