Summary Of The Kiss By Michael Gow

An innate competition between an expansive instinct to refine one’s sense of individuality and a restrictive impulse to remain within the status quo, rejecting information which threatens our existing vision of ourselves, is ongoing within us. Writers therefore knowingly appeal to our desire to self-actualise to explore how the transformative power of discoveries can act to shape our defining qualities and attributes. Unfolding within Michael Gow’s interpretive act Away (composed in 1986 but set in 1968) and Peter Goldsworthy’s short story The Kiss is the catalytic power of discoveries to refine our perspectives on ourselves and others, particularly during the coming of age: that is, both as adolescents approaching adulthood and as a society