Creative Writing: All Quiet On The Western Front

So long as he had been able to hold a view of things in which time was just moments, then days, each one destroying itself in the next; so long, that is, as it was a process without sequence, he could face himself and hang on. Living was vertical. You stood up new in each moment of it, and if you were strong, and luck was with you, you got from one moment to the next. It was all moments and leaps. But now he had to take on again the notion of a self that was continuous, that belonged to the past and was to have a hfe again in the future. That’s what scared him - the need to carry forward into the ordinariness that was coming a view of time, and of your whole life in it, that he had had to suppress in himself simply to stay alive. 25 (25 GW

It belonged to his youth, to some finer and more innocent self than the one he had been left with when he came back. 27 (27 GW p. 298) Yet the seeds of diggerism are clearly evident from the moment Vic decides to shape his destiny as a child. If his name means victory, then his victories are achieved at the cost of eternal dismissal. It is only through the Warrenders that he arrives at some kind of a peace. In his attempt to break into a new life Vic projects himself as such a compelling figure, that it reopens the debate of the role of the social relations in sustaining that Malouf had started in Harland’s Half Acre. In the Great World Maloufs seems keen on exploring the possibility of ‘wiping the slate clean’28 (28 Peter Knox-Shaw pg. 89).

That smell – ingrained dirt, coal dust, salt from the sea, mutton fat, sour milk – he loathed it! Stripped to the waist in their outhouse, with a cake of Sunlight soap and a brush, he (Vic) would punish his flesh till it was raw. 29 (29 GW pg