Typical short passage from class: In “Cold Snap”, Kennedy utilises a child narrator in order to make criticisms. The premature mindset of a child narrator allows an unbiased and simplistic perspective on the world. Furthermore, Kennedy establishes an intuitive sense of closeness with nature in the child narrator, Billy. This is portrayed in his sympathetic and compassionate attitude towards killing rabbits, stating that you “kill the rabbit straight off” to avoid animal torture. This connection with nature and with rabbits from which Billy makes many of his poetic comparisons and descriptions is also used by Kennedy to make comparisons with other characters in the text
CLOSE PASSAGE ANALYSIS: try to capture the relationship between the author’s big picture/ views/values/intentions and close passage analysis/significant narrative/poetic/ language devices/word choices.
In “Cold Snap”, Kennedy utilises a child narrator, Billy, who appears to be intuitively close to nature as he sets and checks his rabbit traps. From this perspective, the author explores his relationship with others, such as the lady, who leaves her “porch lights” on at night, and the teacher, Mr Fry who thinks that Billy is usually “wrong”. From the opening passage, it is clear that Billy is proud of his ability to capture and sell rabbits as he relates to the “dogs” who ‘know me” and the bush that seems so naturally “frozen” in the morning. When his mother prepares Billy for his bath, he imagines that he is being skinned like a rabbit. Kennedy’s use of italics as in “skin the rabbit” highlights the attempt to reflect Billy’s mother’s thoughts. Billy proudly notes that Mr Bailey likes “mine better” and is prepared to pay more for the rabbits that Billy catches. As a result, Billy is learning the value of money as he saves up to buy a bike. His sympathetic and compassionate attitude towards killing rabbits is evident when Billy explains that you “kill the rabbit straight off” to avoid animal torture. Kennedy changes from the use of the first person pronoun, to the second person, “you” to capture Billy’s explanation of how to humanely kill an animal and his knowledge that is directed towards an imagined general audience. “You’ve got to set the trap so that it kills the rabbit straight off. On the leg is no good. All night the rabbit will cry and twist and then you have to kill them in the morning when their eyes are looking at you, wondering why you did it.”
Kennedy depicts Billy’s connection with nature in order to investigate the estrangement from nature that is evident among other characters, many of whom come from the city. For example, the story opens with a reference to the “lady” who leaves her lights on the porch shining throughout the night, which is not only an “atrocious waste of power”, according to Billy’s father, but also reveals the lady’s anxiety as she lives in a bush setting. Kennedy also refers to the outsiders, the city people, as “tourists” who do not hesitate to buy houses that appear to be also “bloody atrocious”. Likewise, Mr Fry is scornful of Billy’s attitude and sneers at his apparent foolhardiness, when he tries to explain his feelings about the tree that does not lose leaves but bark. Kennedy portrays Billy’s sense of harmony with nature, which is evident as he “felt the words come up, and I said they didn’t (loose their leaves), they lost their bark”. Billy’s description sets him up for ridicule among the the other kids in the class. Kennedy’s captures Billy’s thoughts in the present-participles (used as adjectives): “The other kids sitting, smiling, staring down at their hands, waiting for after school like the dogs wait for the rabbits”. Billy’s simile again reinforces his natural obsession with his rabbits.
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