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Chapter 16
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Fly Away Peter, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Language and Naming
Boundaries and Perspective
Time, Change, and Impermanence
Friendship and Human Connection
Innocence and Maturity
Summary
Analysis
Jim finds himself blinking up at the sky from the ground. He watches clouds pass, diaphanous and wispy as they melt one into another. He tries to mark his position for the stretcher-bearers, but his hand feels as if it has “dissolved,” followed by his arm and shoulder. He then tries to wrap himself in the bandage he always carries, hoping to stop his entire body from “dissolving,” but he doesn’t know where he has been hit, and the bandage seems too long to handle, as if it could unfurl and roll “halfway round the world. To the Coast. To home.” As he tries to handle the field-dressing, a “slow shadow” comes down upon him, “blurring the shape of things.”
Malouf’s use of the word “dissolve” in this moment—after Jim has been injured on the battlefield—brings to mind the idea of impermanence and transience. Although Jim may be on the verge of death, the language Malouf uses speaks of transition and transformation more than it denotes a sense of finality. As Jim fades away, his mind returns to Australia, proving once again that the human psyche is unbound by physical limitations.
Active
Themes
Jim blinks and finds himself staring at the top flap of a canvas tent. The tent is crowded with men who are “maimed and crudely bandaged, each with a white label tied to a button of his tunic.” These men have what Jim identifies as “an air of eternal patience,” of “having given themselves up utterly to a process of slow dissolution.” Nearby, a man wearing a bloodied butcher’s apron works at a “block,” which Jim thinks he can smell. “I am in the wrong place,” Jim thinks. “I don’t belong here. I never asked to be here. I should get going.” All the same, he understands that he must wear the same expression on his face that all the other men have in the tent—after all, they are “a brotherhood” and always have had been “a foot from the block and waiting, even in safe city streets.”
Given that the men in this tent have tags on their tunics, it seems likely that they have died. This would also explain Jim’s feeling that they all have “an air of eternal patience” on their faces. However, Jim’s consciousness is still active, suggesting that he hasn’t yet fully passed into the world of the dead. When he thinks of the people in the tent as “a brotherhood,” he suggests that all humans are united because of the fact that they are always nearing death, eternally growing closer to mortality’s chopping “block.”
Active
Themes
Jim closes his eyes and hears a voice calling his name. The voice, he knows, belongs to Ashley Crowther. Opening his eyes, Jim finds Ashley by his side, “also in the shambles.” Like the others, Ashley is wearing a white tag. Apparently, Jim and Ashley have seen each other twice since coming to France. The first time, their companies were “in the same line,” so they stood next to each other for a moment and smoked. The second time was a month later, when they found each other in an abandoned château where some other soldiers had set up a bar of sorts. When Jim woke up in that château the next morning, it was to the sound of Ashley playing the piano.
Active
Themes
Back in the tent, Ashley asks Jim if he can hear him. When Jim confirms that he can, Ashley says they need to leave this place, revealing that he knows the way out. Looking at his friend, Jim notices the small mark of a cross on his forehead but doesn’t know what to make of it. Once he manages to stand, Ashley helps him out of the tent and leads him to a stretch of moonlit woods. “Here it is,” he says, and when Jim looks around he realizes that he has been here before—this is the place where he saw the old man digging in the garden. The “blasted” trees, he observes, seem to have “renewed themselves with summer growth,” and several birds sing in their branches.
Active
Themes
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Jim lets go of Ashley’s arm and moves toward the garden, where a number of men are on their knees and digging. The earth smells good, with “a smell that belonged to the beginning of things.” Jim gets on his knees and puts his hands in the ground. “That’s it, mate,” says Clancy Parkett. “That’s the style! Dig!” Startled, Jim looks up and is disconcerted to see his old friend, who died almost a year ago. “I thought you’d been blown up,” he says. “You just disappeared into thin air.” Clancy responds, “not air, mate, Earth.
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Themes
Clancy tells Jim that he and everybody else in the garden are “digging through to the other side.” When Jim points out how long this will take, Clancy simply laughs, saying, “There’s all the time in the world, mate. No trouble about time.” Jim looks around and sees hundreds of digging men with long beards and tattered uniforms, a gentle morning light accentuating the subtle “curve of the earth.” Since so many others are digging, he decides it must be the right thing to do. And anyway, Clancy wouldn’t steer him wrong. He begins to “dig in earnest.” When he looks around to find Ashley, he discovers he’s no longer at his side.
Active
Themes
Jim digs with the rest of the men, feeling the “rich” earth, which is “warm” in his fingers. However far he must dig, he knows the “direct route—straight through” is best. Having thought this, Jim turns to Clancy, and his friend returns his look with a “humorous gaze.” As both men smile, Jim goes back to digging, thinking that this, perhaps, is what hands “were intended for, this steady digging into the earth, as wings were meant for flying over the curve of the planet to another season.”
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