Nature and Initiation in An Imaginary Life and Remembering Babylon

Jörg Heinke, University of Kiel, Germany

For Carney and Adair the natural environment with its seemingly limitless limitations is the frame in which their physical isolation leads to a mental intimacy. For both of them the hut in which they meet and the vast country around them are a double prison: in the one you can't move anywhere because it's too small, in the other one you can move but you don't get anywhere because it's too big. The only possibilities to escape this double prison are death (in Carney case) or the concentration on to the self (Adair). The initiation process for Adair is the rethinking and reconsideration of his life.

• The Stranger in Three Novels by David Malouf: Introduction
• Georg Simmel, Strangeness, and the Stranger
• The Motif of Strangeness in David Malouf's Works: An Imagined Life
• The Motif of Strangeness in David Malouf's Works: Remembering Babylon
• The Motif of Strangeness in David Malouf's Works: Conversations at Curlow Creek
• Nature and Initiation in An Imaginary Life and Remembering Babylon
• Strangeness and Nature in David Malouf

This document has been adapted by kind permission of the author from the English summary of "The Phenomenon of the Stranger in David Malouf's An Imaginary Life, Remembering Babylon and The Conversations at Curlow Creek," his University of Kiel Master's thesis. You can contact Jörg Heinke at [email protected] or visit his personal home page.