The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013

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Themes

Predestination and Fate

Dorrigo often thinks that there is no purpose to the world or to his life: “The world. It just is” (186). He says the same thing about the existence and purpose of horror. When something horrible happens, he believes that it was always going to happen, no matter what. This casts a cynical light on Darky’s optimism, Ella’s efforts to maintain his attention, and his own halfhearted attempts to remain faithful to her. When there is no purpose, and life seems to be nothing but chaos, efforts to change reality seem naïve to Dorrigo. The irony is that he continues to seek distraction in poetry and women. He does not give up or commit suicide, despite his loneliness and despair. Like Sisyphus, he continues to make what he believes to be a doomed effort. After leaving Jack Rainbow’s widow, Dorrigo discusses love with a trucker, who reaffirms that life is predestined: “Maybe we just get given our faces, our lives, our fate, our happiness and unhappiness” (331). This sentiment solidifies Dorrigo’s belief that life “just is” and alleviates his responsibility for his lack of love.

The concept of predestination also affects the other characters, particularly as they justify their wartime actions. When the Goanna receives his death sentence and momentarily entertains the notion of escape, he quickly accepts that there is nowhere for him to go: “But there was none, and there never had been” (290). In acknowledging that “there never had been,” the Goanna resigns himself—and his previous actions—to fate. In both pursuits of love and war, the men within the novel cast away accountability and subscribe to the notion that in their chaotic world, the chaotic events that follow are of an unchangeable design.

The Loneliness of Man

Dorrigo has no memories of not being lonely. When he is with Amy, he believes that his solitude has ended, but as soon as he leaves her, he realizes that he was deluding himself. He feels lonely among the men in the camp, lonely at dinners held in his honor, lonely despite his country’s admiration, and lonely in his marriage. He does not understand his inability to connect and often wonders if he is seeking something that doesn’t exist. When he tells the truck driver that Jack Rainbow was a couple, something that he never had, it shows his confused perspective. Dorrigo has the chance to be a couple, both with Ella, Amy, and in theory, with any of the other numerous women he carries on with. However, none of these relationships lead to the end of his loneliness, which raises a question that goes largely unanswered: How does Dorrigo Evans define love? Based on his chronic cynicism, it is unlikely that he would recognize the end of loneliness if it arrived. He sees himself as a bad man, not worthy of love, and his distorted perspective casts doubt on his judgments.

Memory and PTSD

The narrative’s frame, which reflects temporal shifts, represents the tenuousness of memory and parallel’s the human perception of memory and time. In the chapter showing the difficulties that camp survivors faced throughout their post-war lives, memory is a torment. When Jimmy Bigelow forgets the camp in his 90s, it is the only time he is shown to be free: “First he forgot the horror of it all, later the violence done to them by the Japanese” (384). Memories of war haunt the former POWs throughout their lives, and only in death, or near death, are they able to free themselves of this burden.

Dorrigo’s memories of Amy help him through some of his most difficult times in the camp, but they also torment him. Memory is a type of prison in the novel, most clearly evidenced in Dorrigo’s statement that an unhappy man has nothing but his past: “A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else” (4). Although the trauma of war is not directly addressed as PTSD, the memory of war affects the soldiers and dictates the unfortunate outcomes of their lives once the war is over.

Prior to his death, Guy Hendricks sketches various aspects of the camp and its inhabitants to preserve the memories of it, but Dorrigo is tempted to destroy the memories by burning the sketchbook in the funeral pyre. Dorrigo argues that memory is a “wrong idea that makes people feel right” (217), like justice. Throughout the narrative, Dorrigo draws upon key moments—such as Darky’s brutal death and the men shaking his hand before their doomed march—to remind himself that he is not a good man. He continuously maintains this perception despite the praise and celebrity he receives after the war—adulation which he deems an “insult [to] the memory of those who had died” (17). Although Dorrigo opts to burn the sketchbook and its depiction of the camp, his persistent guilt as well as the memory of his actions allow him to accept the existence of the war’s horror and subsequently reject any glorification of his part in the camp affairs.