KPK: A critical interpretation of 'The Coffin is Too Big for the Hole'

Why is this whole play set in a dream?

KuoPao Kun opens the play with ‘I don’t know why, but it keeps coming back to me. This dream. Every time I get frustrated, it comes back to me.’ At the end of the play, he wakes up: ‘As for me, the funeral somehow stuck in my mind and it would often come back to me. In a dream. Especially when I’m frustrated.’ Seeing as to how the events that Kuo describes in Coffin are rooted in a place that seems familiar to us (as opposed to an overtly fantasy world), it seems jarring that he makes this whole play a dream. 

On my first reading, I considered it a strategy that Kuo employed to keep the play out of the reaches of the censor. Seeing as to how he had only been released from imprisonment in 1980, and Coffin was first staged in 1984, this seems rather plausible. ‘It’s just a dream, what! Why are you thinking this is Singapore?’ he’d say. 

On further probing, another possible reading is that this is not a dream but a nightmare – his nightmare that the same fate may befall him. The main character hints at this at the end: ‘Now, with them all in the same size and the same shape, would my sons and daughters, and my grandsons and granddaughters after them, be able to find me out and recognize me?’ 

Either way, I think he shapes the play such that the audience loses sight of this dream context as the play progresses, and instead latches on to the Singaporean context as the different characters are fleshed out. Kuo brings the dream back only at the end, to remind them and to conclude the play.

The shaping of the situation and character through language 

I divide this section by character:

1. The main character’s narration: 

‘You see, my folks started drifting apart when they first got married, one after the other. Grandfather was very cross at first, about the breaking up of the extended family.’

Kuo expresses the thought process of the character through the fragmentation of his speech, such as in the second line of the above quote. As a written statement, ‘The breaking up of the extended family made Grandfather very cross’ would be more appropriate. Instead, Kuo reverses the order to highlight how his Grandfather’s reaction was what he remembered most.

The main character also repeats ‘You see’ several times as a part of his speech to his audience, as a speech habit that Kuo shapes for him. As a result, the lines seem less ‘scripted’ and more spontaneous, as if his telling this story was a spur-of-the-moment decision.

2. The main character’s speech: 

‘OK, forget it. Hurry up and dig the hole bigger.’

In his speech to the funeral parlour man, the main character code-switches from a more formal syntax into a more Singlish one: ‘dig the hole bigger’ is used in place of ‘dig a bigger hole’. In this, Kuo illustrates something that many Singaporeans do intuitively, almost unconsciously, and as they transition from a more formal situation into a casual one. 

3. Funeral parlour man: 

‘I know, sir, […] Change into a smaller coffin. We have a wide range of coffins. We have very big ones too, although not so big as this one, but which could fit the standard holes. We even have teak-wood ones. Very lasting…’

Here Kuo illustrates the stereotype of the salesman who has memorized his pitch, which he uses to characterize the worker who does his job by rote. In the dialogue that Kuo writes, we can almost imagine the character’s eyes becoming unfocused as he says this, and we may be reminded of some of the service staff in Singapore.

4. Officer-in-charge: 

‘There will only be this one exception and no such requests will be entertained ever again. One man, one grave, one plot!’

In ‘One man, one grave, one plot’, the officer condenses his speech into a slogan. Kuo might be using him to evoke the stereotype of the politician: someone who delivers ideas in a forceful and memorable manner.

I think Kuo is trying to use these characters as a means of illustrating some of the stereotypical characters we see in Singaporean society. He makes them funny and sometimes absurd, inducing the audience to laugh at these characters and in turn at themselves.