Analytical Essay on "the Fire on the Snow"

Douglas Stewart’s radio play, The Fire On The Snow, first performed in 1941, presents the story of Captain Falcon Robert Scott’s tragic expedition to the South Pole. In the radio play, Stewart skilfully positions the audience to accept the dominant reading of the play by showing the dominant discourse: that heroes’ nobility depends on their action and ordinary people can become heroes too. Stewart also positions the audience by using the role of the Announcer as a mask for himself to give comments to the stages during play in lyric verse forms and factual commentary statements, and also involve the men’s dialogue.

In November, 1911, Captain Falcon Robert Scott led a British team across the snows of Antarctica, striving to be the first to attain the South Pole. After marching and hauling over 800 miles, Scott and his four comrades reached the Pole in Jan, 1912, only to find out that Amundsen’s team (five Norwegians) had achieved the goal a month earlier. Scott, Wilson, Oates, Bowers and Evans, all perished in the ice on the return journey, but became national heroes, because of the selfless, sacrifice for the others and their heroic action to the Pole. Their race against the Norwegians to be the first reaches the Pole, laid the foundation of one of Antarctica’s most tragic legends.

Due the time frame when Stewart was writing the play, which is during the Second World War, he effectively positions the audience to sympathize with the tragic death of the heroes in the play by reinforcing the main discourses of both personal and national sacrifices of ordinary men. Many dramatic techniques were used to enhance the audience’s awareness of the struggles that the men had been through. One of the major techniques is Stewart’ positioning of the audience involved the use of lyric verse to assist the audience to create the visual and auditory imagery and to feel the harsh atmosphere that the play has created; and also through some technical devices such as the metaphors, similes, alliteration, assonance, repetition and rhyme within the verses, as found in the texts of the Announcer. Stewart has successfully used these techniques to reflect the feelings deep inside the men’s struggle of physical difficulties against the nature of freezing snows and blizzards; emotional struggle of depression, pressure and disappointment; and Stewart symbolizes “The Fire On The Snow” as “man against snow, the spirit of man against all that conspires to defeat him”.

In the beginning of the play, the Announcer makes a clear factual statement that the South Pole has spelt death as Stewart emphasizes the danger and hardship of the exploration ventures with his references to “…no matter how bleak, how black… heroes will not turn back” and “five men struggling like dark tough flames on the snow”; through the usage of metaphor, simile and symbolism in order to reinforce the visual imagery of the solitude environment and the myriad challenges faced by Scott and his men. “…flames on the snow” consist of the use of symbolism to present the human spirit against the white sterile nature of Antarctica by symbolizing the human spirit as ‘flames’ and the snow as ‘white and pureness’. Stewart also uses the combination of simile, alliteration, assonance and repetition as shown in “All this and is white… The snow slowing the sledge like waves of white iron”; to enhance the audience’s attention to the stages and situations of the men’s marching journey. Stewart adroitly combines four technical devices within one verse as an appeal to the emotions. He used ‘white iron’ to describe the ‘heaviness’ of the snow which in order to convey the difficulty and arduousness of matching and hauling the sledges on the snow to the Pole; and he described the surrounding environment is snowing like unceasing waves and reinforced the ‘colour’ of the Pole with the repetition of ‘white’.

The other major technique that Stewart has used in the play is the dialogue of the men (the ‘voices’ of the central characters),