The Happiest Refugee Literary Elements

Autobiography

The action described in the autobiography takes place in Vietnam and Australia. The action starts at the end of the Vietnam War and continues until the present time.

The action is told from the perspective of a first-person subjective point of view.

The tone and mood in the autobiography is a neutral one.

The protagonist is the author and his family and the antagonists are the pirates who stole everything they had.

The major conflict is between peace and violence.

The autobiography reaches its climax when the narrator and his family reach Australia.

The violence described at the beginning of the autobiography foreshadows the later violent instances in which the narrator's father will get involved in.

When the narrator claims that life in Australia will be perfect is an understatement because he later describes the problems he and his family had to go through.

The main allusion we find in the autobiography is the idea that comedy is a coping mechanism the main character uses to deal with the trauma of his past.

One of the most important images in the autobiography is the one of the main character's father. He is described as an extremely strong man who is capable of dealing with everything that is thrown at him. This image is important because the narrator often mentiones this image in his moments of struggle.

A paradoxical idea is a way in which many Vietnamese people who escaped from the war and arrived in Australia relatively in good shape had a hard time adapting to the new culture and this destroyed more people than the war did.

N/A

The boat on which the narrator and his family escaped from Vietnam is used here as a general term to make reference to hope and the possibility of a better future.

We have a personification in the sentence "these houses were as depressed as we were".