A Comparative Study Of Birds Of Passage And The Ancestor Game In The Perspective Of Initiation Story

Brian Castro and Alex Miller are celebrated Australian contemporary writers. Although they live in different environment and own different writing styles, both of their representative works Birds of Passage and The Ancestor Game describe the protagonist’s mental initiation in some sense. Seamus O’Young, the protagonist in Birds of Passage which is Brian Castro’s first novel and is recognized by critics as one of the earliest works describing the experience of Asian immigrants in Australia, is an Australia-born Chinese but knows nothing about his parentage and is isolated by both cultures of Australia and China. Langtze, the protagonist in The Ancestor Game which is a masterpiece by Alex Miller and is acclaimed as an excellent work portraying Australia and China by New York Times Book Review, lives in two contradictory lifestyles. Both of them suffer from the trauma of cultural displacement and experience the process of innocence, puzzlement and finally find their respective identities. The two works basically conform to the initiation story both in the aspect of theme and structure.This thesis analyzes and compares the two novels Birds of Passage and The Ancestor Game from the perspective of initiation story by the method of comparative study. Based on close textual analysis, the paper mainly makes an attempt to elaborate the common point between the two novels to show that they are representative initiation stories though few critics have dealt with the exploration from this perspective. The whole thesis consists of five parts with the first chapter providing a general introduction of Brian Castro and his work Birds of Passage, Alex Miller and his work The Ancestor Game, literature review, significance and structure of the paper. In the second chapter, the theoretical framework is formed through detailed elaboration on the notion of initiation story, together with its theoretical developments. Based on the theoretical framework, it comes to the main parts of the paper chapter three and four, by detailedly dealing with the features of initiation story in the theme and structure in Birds of Passage and The Ancestor Game respectively. And the chapter five comes to the conclusion, which sums up the whole thesis and looks into the future.This comparative study helps to provide a new perspective and connection to appreciate Birds of Passage and The Ancestor Game so as to offer a reference for Chinese and foreign scholars to study the two works and other Australian literature of this kind.