Countless arguments and disagreements divide the residents of number one, Cloudstreet over the years, and the members of each family constantly struggle to relate to one other. But gradually, they come to accept the common humanity that they share, even across families that initially seemed wildly different in terms of their morals and priorities. Cloudstreet doesn’t deny the existence of good and evil, or absolve any character of their responsibilities just because being human is difficult. Instead, the novel portrays a realistic but sympathetic view of humanity, where anyone and everyone has the potential to grow cold and malicious—or become good and loving.
One example of a shared human connection comes towards the end of the novel, when Dolly and her daughter Rose make amends after Dolly explains her traumatic upbringing. Importantly, this doesn’t completely excuse Dolly’s careless behavior over the years, and her relationship with her daughter remains complicated. But after sharing this moment of vulnerability, both Dolly and Rose find the space to reconcile, with the shared understanding that they’ve both endured hardships that have shaped them for better or worse. After this, Rose can no longer treat her mother as an evil, alien entity to be scorned and dismissed; she must accept that Dolly is just as human as she is. Quick has a similar but much more intense revelation when he fails to save a boy from drowning, only to discover that the boy was the son of the depraved serial killer Quick and the local police department had been tracking down. One reason Quick became a police officer was to fight evil, but it shocks him to discover that the serial killer, the evilest person he knows, is a human being and hadn’t always been a monster. In fact, after realizing this, Quick can imagine himself having become just as depraved and evil as the killer if things had gone differently in his own life. He still knows that evil exists, but it startles him to learn that evil comes from the choices people make and the circumstances that shape them, rather than being innate.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Shared Humanity ThemeTracker
Shared Humanity Quotes in Cloudstreet
The war’s over, he knows, but he picks up sadness like he’s got a radar for it. The whole world’s trying to get back to peace but somewhere, always somewhere there’s craters and rubble and still the lists and the stories coming home as though it’ll never let itself be over. There’s families still on this street who’ve lost men, and while they remember the war will still be on.
The sky, packed with stars, rests just above his head, and when Quick looks over the side he sees the river is full of sky as well. There’s stars and swirl and space down there and it’s not water anymore—it doesn’t even feel wet. Quick stabs his fingers in. There’s nothing there. There’s no lights ashore now. No, there’s no shore at all, not that he can see. There’s only sky out there, above and below, everywhere to be seen. Except for Fish’s giggling, there’s no sound at all.
He’d spent years arresting people for things both mild and maniacal. He’d been to war and lived a Depression on the land, been a father and a husband, and this week, even an adulterer, but it counted for nothing because here he was with Beryl Lee on the end of his bed beggin the question: why was it that he didn’t know a thing about the underlying nature of people, the shadows and shifts, the hungers and hopes that caused them to do the things they did?
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.
Every important thing that happened to him, it seemed, had to do with a river. It was insistent, quietly forceful like the force of his own blood. Sometimes he thought of it as the land’s blood: it roiled with life and living. But at other moments, when a dead sheep floated past, when the water was pink with storm mud, when jellyfish blew up against the beaches in great stinking piles, Quick wondered if it was the land’s sewer. The city had begun to pile up over it as the old buildings went and the ugly towers grew. But it resisted, all the same, having life, giving life, reflecting it.
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.
They’re gonna come looking for him. The police, the screaming, hurting family, the whole defeated city. You have to be a winner. Even the short and ugly and deformed, they have to win sometimes. He’s winning, beating them all. A little truckdriving bloke with no schooling, he’s killing them in their beds and they’re losing at last.
The room goes quiet. The spirits on the wall are fading, fading, finally being forced on their way to oblivion, free of the house, freeing the house, leaving a warm, clean sweet space among the living, among the good and hopeful.
But it’s not us and them anymore. It’s us and us and us. It’s always us. That’s what they never tell you. Geez, Rose, I just want to do right. But there’s no monsters, only people like us. Funny, but it hurts.
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.
