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Dialect
Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—Rails Go Forever:
Dolly’s father told her stories about the railroads that made her love and romanticize them as a child. The narrator employs simile and flashback in this passage to show how Dolly once saw the railway tracks as a primary source of connection for everyone in the entire world:
Those rails go all over the world. They go forever. And she felt it was true. It was like they were electric with all knowledge, all places, all people.
The flashback brings the reader into a moment in Dolly’s childhood when she stood by the tracks and imagined their reach stretching endlessly. When she says “they go forever,” it shows how large and mysterious the world felt to her childish gaze. Here, Winton captures the way children often exaggerate the size or meaning of ordinary things. For Dolly, the rails connect every place in the universe with her hometown. Her young mind treats them as a pathway to everything important in the world she doesn’t yet know or understand.
The simile “like they were electric with all knowledge, all places, all people” also works to turn the steel rails into something alive and charged. Instead of being inert metal, this simile compares them to wires full of energy. They are glowing with purpose, which makes them feel to Dolly as though they might hold all the world’s data and its stories inside them. In her eyes, the rails contain within them the key to accessing the entire map of life. Winton uses this memory to highlight Dolly’s sense of childhood hopefulness and curiosity. It’s very different from the disillusionment and sense of entrapment she feels as an adult.
Related Themes:
