Bursts as it doesn’t follow the pattern
Not Waving but Drowning Theme of Death. You'd think that there couldn't be a clearer distinction than the one between life and death, but "Not Waving but Drowning" goes out of its way to muddy the water, so to speak. The focus, after all, is a talking corpse who just won't shut up even though the living can't hear him.
The story is in the form of several separate myths that are largely independent of each other. Different parts of the story involve different characters. Each part of the story explains how something in the world came to be. The fact that this is an oral story also might have influenced the story’s structure over time. Different speakers may have added or removed information from the story when it was spoken. This idea might explain why the story feels somewhat disjointed, particularly when compared to a written story, which typically doesn’t change over time.
hope this helps :p