Analysis of Tim Winton's Cloudstreet
First Cloudstreet Essay
Cloudstreet is a mystical hymn of each character’s journey to finding peace and redemption within their lives. From separate tragedies, the Pickleses and the Lambs come to Cloudstreet seeking a fresh start. Winton’s exploration of a mystical journey to redemption is represented through the complex relationship between Fish and Quick Lamb. Their relationship is ridden with guilt, despair, a sense of mystical hope and a fervent desire for freedom, ideas that are widely important for the maintenance of human hope.
Quick Lamb’s guilt becomes a driving force in his search for redemption. From the outset of the novel, Quick Lamb ‘knows his brother Fish is smarter and better looking than him and that people love him more,’ highlighting the superior light Quick holds his brother in. Quick’s guilt becomes his defining feature, described through the metaphor ‘Quick stiffs up with guilt, with sadness,’ a manifestation of the blame he places on himself for the tragedy that has bereaved his family. The paradoxical nature of Fish’s life described through the antithesis of ‘He’s been alive and he’s been dead,’ comes to define not only Quick’s view of his brother but also his family’s, furthering Quick’s desire to repent for what he has done. Quick’s allegoric ‘gallery of the miserable,’ serves as a constant reminder for himself that ‘he is alive, he is lucky, he is still healthy, and his brother is not,’ a tri-colon reiterating the remorse he feels and establishing the irony of being ‘Quick Lamb the Survivor,’ when his brother is ‘just gone.’ The guilt Quick holds over himself comes to define the agonising nature of his relationship with Fish, representing the power of self-blame in the universal search for approval and redemption.
The sorrowful, yet loving relationship between Quick and Fish is a realistic representation of human relationships and the pain they often bring. Both Quick and Fish bring despair into their relationship, conveyed
Cloudstreet is a mystical hymn of each character’s journey to finding peace and redemption within their lives. From separate tragedies, the Pickleses and the Lambs come to Cloudstreet seeking a fresh start. Winton’s exploration of a mystical journey to redemption is represented through the complex relationship between Fish and Quick Lamb. Their relationship is ridden with guilt, despair, a sense of mystical hope and a fervent desire for freedom, ideas that are widely important for the maintenance of human hope.
Quick Lamb’s guilt becomes a driving force in his search for redemption. From the outset of the novel, Quick Lamb ‘knows his brother Fish is smarter and better looking than him and that people love him more,’ highlighting the superior light Quick holds his brother in. Quick’s guilt becomes his defining feature, described through the metaphor ‘Quick stiffs up with guilt, with sadness,’ a manifestation of the blame he places on himself for the tragedy that has bereaved his family. The paradoxical nature of Fish’s life described through the antithesis of ‘He’s been alive and he’s been dead,’ comes to define not only Quick’s view of his brother but also his family’s, furthering Quick’s desire to repent for what he has done. Quick’s allegoric ‘gallery of the miserable,’ serves as a constant reminder for himself that ‘he is alive, he is lucky, he is still healthy, and his brother is not,’ a tri-colon reiterating the remorse he feels and establishing the irony of being ‘Quick Lamb the Survivor,’ when his brother is ‘just gone.’ The guilt Quick holds over himself comes to define the agonising nature of his relationship with Fish, representing the power of self-blame in the universal search for approval and redemption.
The sorrowful, yet loving relationship between Quick and Fish is a realistic representation of human relationships and the pain they often bring. Both Quick and Fish bring despair into their relationship, conveyed