As the Lamb and Pickles children come of age, many of them try to strike out on their own and leave their families behind them, though with limited success. For instance, while Hattie ends up living happily with Geoffrey Birch away from Cloudstreet, she’s the only exception to the repeating pattern of an independent life coming to a swift end—Ted Pickles dies suddenly a few years after leaving his family. And while Quick and Rose are both desperate to leave Cloudstreet behind at various points in their lives, they both end up returning to live there, as if it was always inevitable. Notably, they both return willingly, illustrating that their family ties no longer feel like chains holding them back. Through various characters’ failed attempts to leave, Cloudstreet portrays family ties as strong and important—important enough to override a person’s desire for independence, and strong enough to help people overcome seemingly insurmountable differences with other family members.
Cloudstreet portrays family ties as things that are supernaturally strong and powerful. Years after Quick runs away from home at 16, his old life begins calling to him through visions and signs, eventually culminating in him physically glowing like a light bulb until he's reunited with the other Lambs. Rose also can’t ignore the pull back to Cloudstreet, as she begins to lose too much weight again and becomes miserable in her independent life away from her family. These extreme reactions and supernatural events aren’t portrayed as coercive or malicious events that steer the characters back into a house that they hate. Instead, these moments are manifestations of their true desires: the novel suggests that Quick and Rose feel the call to return to Cloudstreet because independence wasn't what they really wanted. Indeed, family, togetherness, and unity win out in the end when the Lamb and Pickles families decide that they should no longer be independent from each other and merge into one united clan.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Family vs. Independence ThemeTracker
Family vs. Independence Quotes in Cloudstreet
Some people are lucky, she heard him say. Joel, he’s lucky. Got a good business. His hayburners win. See, I got me ole man’s blood. Dead unlucky.
Rose yawned. Until your luck changes.
Luck don’t change, love. It moves.
It’s just them in this vast indoors and though there’s a war on and people are coming home with bits of them removed, and though families are still getting telegrams and waiting by the wireless, women walking buggered and beatenlooking with infants in the parks, the Pickleses can’t help but feel that all that is incidental. They have no money and this great continent of a house doesn’t belong to them. They’re lost.
He wondered what he’d done to turn Quick away. He secretly hoped for an end to it like the return of the son in the story and it made him wonder if he wasn’t still half believing. Those Bible stories and words weren’t the kind you forgot. It was like they’d happened to you all along, that they were your own memories. You didn’t always know what they meant, but you did know how they felt.
Rose. People are… who they are.
Then they should change! People should do things for themselves, not wait for everyone else to change things for em!
You can’t beat your luck, love.
No, you have to be your luck. There’s nothin else, there’s just you.
He knows he’s not crazy, he’s convinced of it, and he’s right. But he’s not firing on all six, that’s for sure, because as he lies there, buckled and ready to stop breathing at any moment, he knows he can’t decide how he feels—enlightened or endangered, happy or sad, old or young, Quick or Lamb.
The strong are here to look after the weak, son, and the weak are here to teach the strong.
What are we here to teach you, mum?
Too early to say.
How you longed, how you stared at me those thundery nights when we all tossed and the house refused to sleep. It’s gone for you now, but for me the water backs into itself, comes around, joins up in the great, wide, vibrating space where everything that was and will be still is. For me, for all of us sooner or later, all of it will always be. And some of you will be forever watching me on the landing.
She felt the Shadow in her, this dark eating thing inside, like an anger, and sensed that it’d always be with her. But Quick would hold her up beyond reason, even when it went into stupidmindedness. It wasn’t just the fact that she knew he could do it for her that made her love him. It was her certainty that he would.
Rose remembered the way she took command of a situation in a dozen crises—when Dolly was sick, when she herself was hurt, and she couldn’t think why the very strength of that woman’s actions felt so unforgivable. Her kindness was scalding, her protection acidic. Maybe it’s just me, thought Rose, maybe I can’t take it from her because my mother never gave it to me. What a proud bitch I am. But dammit, why does she always have to be right and the one who’s strong and the one who makes it straight, the one people come to? Why do I still dislike her, because she’s so totally trustworthy?
Don’t you want to be independent?
Quick, I don’t even know what it means anymore. If it means being alone, I won’t want it. If I’m gunna be independent do you think I need a husband? And a kid? And a mother and father, and inlaws and friends and neighbors? When I want to be independent I retire. I go skinny and puke. You’ve seen me like that. I just begin to disappear. But I want to live, I want to be with people, Quick. I want to battle it out. I don’t want our new house. I want the life we have.
I’m a man for that long, I feel my manhood, I recognize myself whole and human, know my story for just that long, long enough to see how we’ve come, how we’ve all battled in the same corridor that time makes for us, and I’m Fish Lamb for those seconds it takes to die, as long as it takes to drink the river, as long as it took to tell you all this, and then my walls are tipping and I burst into the moon, sun and stars of who I really am. Being Fish Lamb. Perfectly. Always. Everyplace. Me.
