Something else you’ll see as we go is the way in which Winton chooses details that have a certain kind of resonance, based on their association with death, decline, failure, and so on.
Some of these will be more obvious than others.
Burke and Wills is a non-obvious example. To get the resonance, you have to know that Burke and Wills were pair of early Australian explorers who led a doomed expedition to traverse the continent from which they never returned.
But if you do know Burke and Wills, this detail will trigger certain resonances in the back of your mind, making you think of death, doom, and people leaving and never returning, and so on.
We’ll see other resonant details as we proceed through these lessons.
Symbols vs resonance
Recurring, resonant details in stories are often called symbols. We’ll avoid that term here because we find it a little too analytical, and discussion of symbols can turn texts into a kind of logic puzzle that might not helpful for learning how to write.
So we’ll stick with the more musical term resonance, which might be a more accurate description of what’s really going on.
When you strike a key on a piano, you not only hear the note you played, you hear a bunch of other tones as strings vibrate in sympathy with the primary note.
A similar process happens with words: when someone says a word, other words/thoughts/ideas will resonate in your mind in response (assuming they exist in your mind in the first place, and you associate them with the primary word).
