The Union Buries Its Dead - Archetypal

The Union Buries Its Dead tells the story of a traveller who drowns in a river, narrated by one of the towns locals, who narrates the proceedings of the funeral for the traveller. It is probably one of the few stories that only complies to very few aspects of the archetypal structure. It does begin with a call to adventure, of a sort, when the traveller whom the narrator his friends shared a joke with, turns up drowned in the billabong and the towns holds a funeral for him. The narrator doesn’t meet a mentor, though his discussion with the townsfolk about his interaction with the deceased could be forced and moulded into the archetypal structure of ‘meeting a mentor’. Lawson does ‘cross a threshold’, in changing of the town before the death and the town after the death of the traveller. If there were two trials that could loosely fit into the ‘trials or failures’ section of archetypal structure; the town trying to identify who the dead man was, and holding and attending the slightly awkward funeral. There was no growth or skills of the narrator or any one else, or any clear clear death and rebirth of the remaining characters. There was possibly a revelation, when the town finally puts a name (James John Tyson) to the dead man, but that is later diminished through them finding out that it wasn’t his real name, which they proceeded to forget, but that comes after the ‘returned changed’ section. There was no real atonement, unless the fact that they briefly mourned for the traveller can be forced into that section. The narrator or other townspeople didn’t receive a gift, although they did return changed; they changed back to the way they were before the death as they returned to their normal world and the story ended. 

There were no archetypal characters in The Union Buries Its Dead, and no obvious archetypal situations, although the death of James J Tyson would generally be considered as a task or a trial.

The dead traveller could clearly be considered as a symbol of death, but what is interesting is how the Priest was labelled as ‘the Devil’, and he could represent how insincere people and societies are becoming in regards to respect for the dead. This can be concluded through the narrator considering the Priest as ‘a an ignorant and conceited ass’, who ‘couldn’t lose an opportunity to assert his faithfulness and importance to the Church’.

In conclusion, The Union Buries Its Dead is probably one of the few stories that could be considered to not follow the archetypal structure, and only complying to certain aspects by chance.