George Bernard Shaw And His Short Story About The Cremation Of The Narrator's Mother

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Shaw's mood is revealed as ambivalent toward cremation by imposing
recalled fragments of ground burial for contrast. Strangely fascinated, he
begins to wonder exactly what happens when one is cremated. This mood of awe is
dramatized as he encounters several doors to observe in his chronological
investigation. He sees “a door opened in the wall,” and follows the coffin as
it “passed out through it and vanished as it closed,” but this is not “the door
of the furnace.” He finds the coffin “opposite another door, a real
unmistakable furnace door,” but as the coffin became engulfed in flame, ”the
door fell” and the mystery only continues an hour later as he gazes “through an
opening in the floor.” As he observes two “cooks” picking through “Mama's
dainty little heap of ashes and samples of bone” the mood of dark humor is the
only way he can handle the horror of his mother's death and cremated body. He
has remained an unemotional observer on a journey through the crematorium ...

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