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“ Examine the ‘notion of change’ as revealed through the texts you have studied this year. In your answer you should refer to your prescribed text, one from the prescribed stimulus booklet Changing, and a related text of your own choosing.”
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Everything is constantly changing; indeed, the world is so ephemeral that one may argue it is impossible to step into the same river twice. Given the inevitability of change, the inability to cope with and accept it will lead to a failure to deal with life. Each of the poems in Peter Skrzynecki’s ‘Immigrant Chronicle’ revolves around the key aspect of change. This collection of poems deals with the personal experiences of migrants, how their perspectives are altered, and how this modification of perception is brought about. The process and significance of change is a central issue in every poem. There can be a catalyst for change, as in ‘Kornelia Woloszczuk’ when Kornelia loses her only child, or it can be a gradual process, as exemplified through the increasing depression of patients in ‘Chronic Ward’. In each of these instances, the reader is given a point of view on change, and is shown how perspective can affect the process of change. One’s perspective offers different viewpoints and therefore allows different insights to be gleaned from examining a change; simply looking at something from a different perspective can alter your original view. It is that first move – shifting your perspective – which is the most difficult. The natural instinct of any human being is to resist change, and this notion shines through in ‘Feliks Skrzynecki’, as Feliks refuses to accept the differences between himself and his son. In ‘Chronic Ward’, Peter Skrzynecki delves into the minds of chronically ill mental patients in order to relay what may have been the chain of events which caused them to spiral downwards towards depression and suicide. The conversational tone in the first stanza suggests the illness is not new. It has been going on for some time and the patients have adapted to it. Each of these patients is fixated with death; “[we] Relive the bathtub drama, / The slip-knot confusion / And oven-door mistakes”. Their perspective has a single focus. These patients yearn for a change, and that change is death. At the same time, they are resisting change, in the form of the therapy sessions that are supposed to cure their illness. The treatment is designed to shift their perspective; with a slight change, their entire outlook on life could be altered. In fact, the patients are in a life or death situation; if they do not modify their perception of life, they will not even have a life, outside of the asylum.
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