motif or archetype and its latent sexual power. Indeed, the idea of particular motifs
continuing through the canon gains credence in Season in Purgatory, for example,
in the case of the Australian, Callaghan, who with his carefree larrikin behaviour
replicates his counterpart, Barry Fields of A Victim of the Aurora. Callaghan, like
Fields, has an uncomplicated fresh and more pragmatic view of life. This is
reiterated in the incident where the girl with whom Callaghan has been sexually
compromised, is shot by the Partisans and he berates them, “Bastards ... Bastards’.
He accused everyone. The Yugoslavs. The British. All Europe for its strife” (Keneally,
1976:130).
David’s acceptance of the mantle of pacifism (Keneally, 1976:177) is an
illustration of those moments when the destiny that each person carries with himself
or herself, the destiny fully modelled by the unconscious, reveals itself. When this
occurs, there is no uncertainty in the imperative course of action that must be taken
and as David recognises, it simply has to be done. I n this event, Keneally illustrates
the final luminous encounter of the ego personality with the stranger within, the
Jungian Self. I ndeed, the same type of encounter was fashioned in Cleary; the very
same unconscious processes of the self influencing the significant relationships in
his life; similarly, with Moja and with Dr. Ellis and we also are shown a elemental
part of the psyche that was both enchanted and yet horrifyingly overawed by the
primeval chants of the Homeric-like partisan soldiers (Keneally, 1976:38). David’s
ultimate discovery of himself, of his real nature, is in a sense a terrible one, and his
solution to the problem of what to be, was to exorcise this stranger, this other self,
by a fierce, long, concentrated spiritual and psychological struggle that
metaphorically paralleled the actual physical battle going on around him.
(e) Beyond the Apocalypse
Schindler’s Ark (1982) is, metaphorically, Keneally’s Book of Revelation, the
apocalyptic book of his four European novels and which also portrays the righteous
individual within the context of a messianic theme. Not messianism in the Judeo-
Christian sense but more that of the existentialist in that in between the pain of an
individual’s life, between the capricious cycles of historic forces, the individual is
free, Sisyphus-like, to celebrate their essential being and “.... the pragmatic triumph
of good over evil” (Keneally, 1982:13). Survival, a recurring motif in the Keneally
corpus, and the word survivor are used throughout the text. Structurally, the work