Fly Away Peter Essay Topic: 1
Throughout David Malouf’s novel ‘Fly Away Peter’ there are many opposites used by him. He uses them to symbolise innocence and experience, life and death, and many more.
David Malouf uses quite a number of opposites in his ‘Fly Away Peter’ novel. Whenever he wants something to be shown he uses opposites very often to explain how different the subjects are from each other. The line ‘they were the familiars of death, creatures of the underworld, as birds were of life and air’ is talking about the difference between the two different environments that Jim had been in. Both environments had an animal that represented and described the surroundings. The rats were a symbol of death because of all the dead soldiers around Jim. The rats fed on the corpses of the soldiers. The birds symbolise life and freedom because the birds do not eat the dead flesh of corpses and they can fly which means that they have freedom. The opposite sentence was used to compare life and death and the rats on the warzone.
The other opposite that Malouf included in ‘Fly Away Peter’ was Jim and him discovering his dark side. When Jim was about to fight Wizzer Green, there was a side of Jim that had the intention to kill Wizzer. Compared to the old, peaceful birdwatcher Jim, this Jim is the complete opposite. David Malouf also uses opposites for characters as well and shows how they’ve changed throughout the novel. For Jim it reveals to the readers that he too can be savage instead of being his normal self. This is because of the war which fills Jim up with adrenaline.