The Woman In The Dunes Analysis

The Woman in the Dunes Suna no onna or The Woman in the Dunes is produced by Teshigahara as an adaptation from Abe Kobo’s novel. The outline of the story is as follow. A scientist left the town to a desert for studying insects. He missed a bus back to where he came from, so the villager introduces him to an inn, a place belongs to one widow. The next morning, he woke up and realised that he’s been trapped in the bottom of a sandpit because the rope ladder has been pulled up. At first, he was angry, but slowly he makes his adjustment to this frustrating situation. As the story goes on, he gets used to the pit, and at the end he does not want to leave. Thus, the main idea of this story is about the imprisonment of the main character. There

We, too, are down in this burning sandpit. Sand can represent the job we hate as two main characters have to shovel never-ending deposits of sand into buckets for survive. Since it is portrayed as something we hate, its actions are always the opposite to us, human. We are the animate; sands are the inanimate. We are the mortal; sands are the eternal. We are the impetus for sex, but It is while brushing sand off each other’s body that the man and the woman are ushered into sex; it is not an act of love. Every time the man tries to climb up and escape, the sands go down and try to drown him. Apart from the sand, there are some other elements appeared symbolically: a radio and a mirror. The radio is a symbol of the outside world. It is a connection to society. It only talks about the world outside of the pit. The woman have never owned a radio, which shows that she has never get out of the sandpit which result in her ignorance and unaware of the absence of her