On The Theme Of Isolation In The Garden Book

Brian Castro is an outstanding writer in the new rising Australian literature. With the publication of his first novel, Birds of Passage, Castro has won great reputation and recognition. From then on, Castro became a quick rising star and drew more and more attention from both critics and readers. The Garden Book is Castro's eighth novel, which is set in Australia in the years between the Depression and the Second World War. It depicts the stories of Chinese Australian Swan Hay and people around her.This thesis attempts to study the theme of isolation in The Garden Book in detail.It falls into five parts with the first part making a general introduction to Brian Castro'life and literary works, followed by a literature review of both home and abroad and an exposition of Fromm's theory about loneliness. In addition to that, the central argument and the methodology of this thesis are put forward.Chapter One aims at elaborating four types of isolation represented by the four protagonists: Swan, Darcy, Jasper and Dr Hay. This chapter is divided into four sections. The first section concentrates on that Swan is suffering from her identity as a woman and a Chinese Australian, looking for social admission and recognition from her beloved people. The second section focuses on Darcy, who is a lonely wanderer seeking for a home and dies in solitude in the end. The third section tries to identify Jasper with an isolated man yearning for true love. Though he finally finds his true love, he has no chance to keep it because he dies alone in his last mission during wartime. The last section reveals that Dr Hay is a lonely victim of the racial prejudice.Chapter Two focuses on the arrangements for settings in the novel. There are two parts in chapter two, namely, the natural settings and the social settings. The first part explores the effect of arrangements of natural settings in this novel in deepening the theme of loneliness. The part of social setting reads The Garden Book in the light of social psychology. It mainly borrows Erich Fromm's theory of isolation to analyze the root causes of the protagonists'isolation in the novel. Chapter Three explores the narrative techniques in this novel from two aspects. The first part will concentrate on studying the symbols and their relation to loneliness. The next part will discuss the employment of multiple narrative perspectives and voices in presenting isolation.The last part is a Conclusion summarizing the whole thesis by pointing out that both the artistic arrangements of settings and the remarkable writing techniques have made contributions to deepening the theme of isolation in the novel.