<doc.id=0165.a4>
<title> Literature essay on David Malouf's Remembering Babylon: Between two worlds </title>
I have read the novel Remembering Babylon by David Malouf. The scene is laid in Australia. A white man - Gemmy - who has been living with aborigines during almost half of his life, seeks a white settlement and lives with the settlers for some time. This essay is based on a close reading of two passages. These passages describe the encounter between three farm children and Gemmy. What I have looked at is the narration, the narrator's perspective and what effect this gives. Does the narrator do both the seeing and the talking, or is the narration conducted from a different angle of vision then the narrator's? Are there signs of narratorial omniscience, or is the narrator's knowledge limited? What effect is this narrative technique supposed to have on the reader's response to the text? 

The first question asked concerns the way the narrator presents the text. There being no 'I' in the text, the narrator could be one of the other settlers in the community telling what he/she has seen others experience. However, there is one important thing speaking against this theory - the narrator tells the reader what the characters think, or, as in this example, what a character (here: Gemmy) does not think: "He gave no consideration to what might happen when he arrived." (p 33) The narrator does not do both the seeing and the talking in the regular way as an 'I', but rather he takes pictures, first from the children's camera, then, thirty pages later, the reader can see the same event take place but now through Gemmy's camera. 

This angle of vision that the narrator has, implies a certain amount of omniscience and there are signs of narratorial omniscience in the way the narrator describes on the one hand Lachlan's, Janet's and Meg's thoughts and earlier experiences and on the other hand Gemmy's. Before they have met Gemmy, the narrator says that the children are "barefooted farm children not easily scared." (p 1) These last words - "not easily scared" - signals that the narrator is omniscient. The children are playing; Lachlan is the inventor of the game and the narrator tells about the boy's very strong power of insight: "Cold air burned his nostrils, snow squeaked underfoot, the gun he carried, a good sized stick, hung heavy on his arm." (p 1) When the girls are bored with Lachlan's game the narrator explains it with the words: "they had no experience of snow, and wolves did not interest them." (p1) He even knows that "the idea of wolf had not been transmitted to" the dog. (p 1) Suddenly, Lachlan is brought back to reality: "Lachlan Beattie felt the snow melt at his feet" (p 2) - he discovers Gemmy. The narrator also knows what Lachlan thinks when he first sees Gemmy: "A black! That was the boy's first thought." (p 2) But then the boy can't decide what it is he is seeing: "The thing /.../ was not even, maybe, human. /.../ or a human that /.../ had been changed into a bird, but only halfway." Then he gets it: "Ah, that was it. It was a scarecrow that had somehow caught the spark of life." (p 2-3) At night, when Gemmy approaches one of the huts, he listens to the sound of voices coming from inside the hut, "though the words made no sense to him, /.../ the sound did, the hiss, the buzz" and "believing that if he could only get near enough, the meaning of what was said would come clear to him". These lines are Gemmy's thoughts and they are also the writer's invention. 

With this technique the reader is able to look into several characters' minds and the story becomes less one-sided. The narratee is able to understand both the settlers and Gemmy. The reader can walk in and out of many of the characters' minds and in this way get a more living picture of all characters. We see the fear in the settlers eyes as they begin to feel threatened by Gemmy. This fear is materialised in a stone one of the settlers says he saw Gemmy receive from two blacks. (p98) Gemmy's view upon the encounter with the blacks is naturally described totally different - he receives energy. (p118) What the reader receives is a double experience. Naturally, I, as a 'white', feel more related to the settlers than to Gemmy, but I still think we can imagine the feeling he has, being in that situation. It must be like finding your biological parents after having lived in a foster family and then find that you not in any way can understand your new-found relatives.

Thanks to the narrator's choice of technique we can follow many persons from inside, to know their personalities. The two sides - the white and the black - are presented to me, but I never feel that they really meet and become one world. However, the way these two worlds are painted they make out two very colourful paintings, where the colours sometimes resemble each other. If the narrator had chosen another way of telling the story, with an 'I' for example, all characters minds but one would have been closed to the reader and that had not given the chance to the writer to explain, as thoroughly as he now has, other characters behaviour.
</doc>