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

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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 with humor as ...

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