Question 7 by Richard Flanagan Essay Guide (HSC Common Module)

1Introduction

Today, we’ll be looking at Richard Flanagan’s memoir Question 7 (2023) in the updated HSC Texts and Human Experiences Module. Below is an unpacking of the new syllabus description for HSC Common Module and how we can link this to the ideas in the novel.

From NESA: “Students deepen their understanding of how texts represent individual and collective human experiences. They examine how texts represent emotions and qualities related to these experiences. By responding to a range of texts, students explore how texts provide insight into emotional, intellectual, physical, cultural and lived experiences. They explore the ways texts represent identity, culture, acceptance and growth, invite the reader to see the world differently, and challenge assumptions. Students explore how texts can represent the tension between agency and conformity in our human experience, while examining the paradoxes of motivation and behaviour. Through critical and creative responses to texts, students consider the ways that texts encourage them to reflect personally and challenge their assumptions about the nature of human experience.”

Important things to note:

• individual and collective human experiences
• emotions and qualities related to these experiences
• emotional, intellectual, physical, cultural and lived experiences
• identity, culture, acceptance and growth
• invite the reader to see the world differently, and challenge assumptions
• tension between agency and conformity
• paradoxes of motivation and behaviour
• texts encourage students to reflect personally and challenge their assumptions about the nature of human experience

2Links to the human experience syllabus

A key tip to answer questions for the Common Module is to analyse how the composer’s portrayal of the human experience has allowed them to ______, or, alternatively, invites the responder to ______.

Also, a common pitfall is to focus too much on themes, e.g. language, historical revisionism. When doing your paragraphs, make sure to focus on what the HUMAN EXPERIENCE is rather than thematic concerns.

3Applying the syllabus to Question 7

• Individual and collective human experiences: the narrator undergoes individual experiences of meeting the Japanese prison guards and asserting his father’s version of history. He and his father undergo a collective experience of overcoming their past trauma through reconnecting with loved ones and familiar landscapes. Flanagan also outlines the collective repressed trauma of his family during the colonisation of Tasmania. He also follows the individual experience of Szilard opposing the atomic bomb against the collective scientific community.
• Emotions and qualities related to these experiences: Flanagan undergoes emotions of grief but also a genuine desire to understand the Japanese prison guards’ motivations for their war atrocities. However, he is ultimately unable to reconcile with them due to underlying discontent with their version of history. Both he and his father find reconnecting with loved ones after their trauma to be healing, reflecting how interpersonal connection can renew human resilience. There are also emotions of confusion and shame when reflecting on his family’s past, as he is unable to ascertain the truth of their heritage due to his grandmother’s revising of their roots.
• Emotional, intellectual, physical, cultural and lived experiences: Flanagan reflects the intellectual experiences of H.G. Wells, as facilitated by his turbulent affair with Rebecca West, inadvertently conceiving the notion of the atomic bomb that will spur the scientific community to develop it and cause the destruction of World War II. Flanagan recounts his lived experiences of cultural alienation at Oxford, where literature is steeped in European history and tradition, while his Tasmanian roots are a cultural outlier. He also recounts the economic hardships suffered by his mother as contributing to her resilient character, and how his father’s stoicism is due to lived experiences of WWII.
• Identity, culture, acceptance and growth: the narrator navigates his complex identity as a product of Tasmanian colonial history, along with his dissection of his mother and father’s characters as shaping his own worldview. Initially, he is unable to recognise that his autobiography is authentic, as he perceives the shifting nature of memories and the elusiveness of historical truth, yet ultimately reconciles with this malleability and accepts his role as a writer to capture the past. This prompts his growth as a writer.
• Tension between agency and conformity: the narrator presents his father as a religious dissident during his childhood, which influences the narrator’s own non-conformist views of traditional literature. Instead, he seeks to individualistically write his own truth, based on his past. Szilard refuses to conform to the scientific community’s desire to use the atomic bomb, instead advocating for his moral stance of containing the bomb to avoid disastrous warfare.
• Paradoxes of motivation and behaviour: Flanagan attempts to interact with the Japanese prisoners with genuine understanding but is unable to remain neutral due to his emotional biases, and is ultimately unable to reconcile with them. Szilard wants to stop the development of the atomic bomb, yet his innate intellectual curiosity propels him to continue with the research.

4Final thoughts

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