Hierarchies of Flesh: Racialised Embodiment on the Thai-Burma Railway in Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013)

Abstract

This article reads The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013) through the lens of the racialised body, arguing that the labouring on the Thai-Burma railway exposes the unequal valuation of human life under empire. Whilst the novel is often understood as a meditation on white Australian suffering, masculinity, and memory, its most unsettling insight lies in its attention to those who are already marked as marginal within their respective societies before the war begins. Focusing on Darky Gardiner, an Indigenous Australian soldier, and Choi Sang-min, a Korean conscript in the Japanese army, this article traces how the railway intensifies pre-existing hierarchies, rendering certain bodies especially vulnerable to violence and erasure. Through a close reading of Darky’s brutal beating and death, this article explores how the body becomes the primary site upon which imperial power is exercised. Darky’s destruction is not exceptional but continuous with the racial logics that precede the camp. Choi Sang-min’s violence, however, reflects the unstable position of the colonised subject compelled to perform authority through brutality – in many ways, their interactions can be framed as the ultimate violence of colonisation. In foregrounding these intersecting trajectories, the novel reveals war not as simply a rupture, but as an intensification of the structures that render some lives less visible and, ultimately, seen as less human.