I was just wondering how you would interpret this cartoon.
https://fbcdn-sphotos-a-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/t31/1617629_259588140877095_276129351_o.jpg
Oh how I love visual analysis! It's been so long...
Okay, your safe, basic contention is, as you rightly suggested, a mockery of indefinite imprisonment. But there is soooo much more!
Knight would be the body in the coffin for sure, but he's not technically "out" is he? The coffin is barely visible, the majority of it still inside the prison. And even then he's got to get out of the prison gates which are themselves symbolic of an impenetrable boundary. Translation: even in death, Knight will be locked up as long as the government can keep him there. Furthermore you could make something out of the nature of the funeral procession. Nowadays the dead are transported in hearses, so the horse and carriage could be interpreted as 'anachronisms.' Not that horse drawn carriages were used in the late 80s when Knight was imprisoned, but stick with me on this: the horse and his rider don't belong, they are the product of another era, so the idea of them being used to pull Knight out of his prison implies he too is in a place/time he doesn't belong. I'm sure the cartoonist isn't contending the man should be released into the world, but it is a pretty scathing comment on the government's bureaucracy.
ALTERNATIVELY: you could argue this is a lighthearted piece. Well, as lighthearted as you can get when drawing pictures about serial killers. The cartoonist wants us to laugh along at the idea of a lengthy prison sentence, it's a victimless crime to us. I'd wager most people would consider an indefinite (read: permanent) jail sentence a pretty just outcome for a convicted mass murderer. In this case, we can feel protected by a government that, although incompetent, has inadvertently protected us from this man by keeping him in prison under piles of paperwork tied down by red tape. Julian Knight 'gets out' as they suggest, but is no longer a threat of any kind.
In short: there is no specific way to make sense of a cartoon. I'm an art student, so the pictorial cues came naturally to me, to the point where I'd spend too much time analysing cartoons and not enough on the written text
They can be incredibly ambiguous, and you kind of need more art terminology that persuasive techniques if you want to do close analysis (eg. the black void of the prison interior is indicative of a bleak, inescapable vortex of suffering
) But there is no right answer! As always with english, if you can argue your case rationally and reasonably, then there's little to stop you getting full marks. I could write about either of the two above interpretations, of a completely different one. The assessors are aware how subjective the content is; so long as you're not writing about how the cartoonist is condoning releasing all criminals from jail and replacing the entire government with Clydesdale ponies, you should be fine.
Not sure what you'd make of the... excrement coming from the back of that horse though... that's definitely symbolic of something...