Fly Away Pater, Jim’s Identity Essay, Research Paper

Fly Away Peter

 Novel reflects Jim?s development from Innocence to experience through the portrayal of the scenery within the novel. Eden in the sanctuary to Hades at war.

 Jim often parallel to the ground, Shows his to the ground, shows his perspective from the ground, Jim has a different visual interpretation of the world.

 Innocent: Ashley provides for him, Jim at start portrayed as conservative (hesitant when asked if he would like a ?spin? in the plane). He doesn?t see himself as part of the world he is still discovering his world.

 Europe new land = new possibilities.

 Positive book? Birds: metaphor for hope represent the continually of life.

 Jim discovers his new job in the sanctuary, transformation from awkward to harmonious.

 No free will (Jim), ?Jim felt the ground tilting, as if he had felt it for the first time in Brisbane, to the place where the war was, and felt the drag upon him of all those deaths. The time would come when he would no longer be able to resist. He would slide with the rest. Down into the pit.? Jim has a strong will by the end of the novel ?No, I am not going to die.?

 Jim realizes that the only way he can understand the change (before war until after war) is to join and experience it himself.

 Dramatic change in Jim?s life ?as if a line had been drawn between the past and what was to come, the two parts of his life, and he could look at all that other side clearly now that he was about to leave it.?

 Identity: ?But more reassuring than all this- the places, the stories of a life that was continuous elsewhere ? a kind of private reassurance for himself alone, was the presence of the birds, that allowed Jim to make a map of how the parts of his life were connected, there and here, and to find his way back to a natural cycle of things that the birds still followed undisturbed.

 Knowing Himself: ?Jim wondered about himself. When, afterwards, he left a wide circle round Wizzer Green, it wasn?t out of timidity but from the wish not to be confronted with the same depth within himself, and in the other man, that frightened him and which he did not understand.

 Jim?s Trip to the engine room for hot water is symbolic of Jim?s quest for his own Identity, he has heard all the other men?s stories and is now creating his own.

 Jim sees himself as becoming a part of history as great as the pharaohs.

 Although the war is going on around them the people, maintain a natural cycle of life.

 Jim retains sanity from order; everything he owns is checked and rechecked. Later after the war Jim returns to his world of ordered birds in order to remain sane.

 Malouf shows us Jim?s inability to deal with emotional issues when Clancy tell Jim about Margaret. Jim felt out of place in this conversation.

 War in the novel is portrayed at night as a dark place where as Queensland is always in day and is light. (Link to Eden vs Hell).

 Beginning of the text water is positive, at war, ?water was the real enemy?, at the end it is good again.

 Ideas of the novel? who is better off? Clancy ?blasted out of existence? while retaining an identity, or Sawny with his ? legs, loss of mobility -> loss of independence -> loss of identity.

 ? It was the sense of being alone out here that had broken him.? Group identity vs individual difference and loneliness.

 Horror of war changed Jim, the mammoth fossil that was found days after the end of war, shows Malouf?s cynical view that history has repeated itself and hints that it will happen again, ?It will go on forever. The war, or something like it with a different name.? The mammoth serves to show us where we (mankind) were and how far we have or haven?t come to becoming civilized.

 ? Time, even in the dimension of his own life, had lost all meaning for him.? Time within the frame of a life will give identity.

 Jim?s realization of himself? ?Jim saw that he had been living, till he came here, in a state of dangerous innocence.

 ?The civilian in these men had survived? the men?s true identity had conquered their artificial soldier identity.

 Malouf raises the question ?what is identity?? ?His own life neither more or less important than the rest?? ?What am I doing here??

 Jim, a man born out of earth and is returned to it. Reinforces the cyclic outlook Malouf has on life.

 Surfer in Christ?s crucifixion stance on the wave, wave symbolic of life and history repeating itself, man is positioned where he chooses on the wave/life.