“Like entering the sea and returning to the beach”
Flanagan writes, “WHY AT THE beginning of things is there always light? Dorrigo Evans’ earliest memories were of sun flooding a church hall in which he sat with his mother and grandmother. A wooden church hall. Blinding light and him toddling back and forth in and out of its transcendent welcome, into the arms of women. Women who loved him. Like entering the sea and returning to the beach. Over and over.” The metaphoric sea underscores the repetitive nature of Dorrigo Evans’ childhood memories that was characterized by ample love from various women. Their memorable love yielded pleasure which is comparable with moving between the sea and beach.
“Vanish off the face of the Earth”
Flanagan elucidates, “Jackie Maguire was telling how he had taken the mail train to Launceston and gone looking for her (his wife), but he could find her nowhere. As Dorrigo Evans watched…he hard Jackie Maguire say- She’s vanished off the face of the earth Mrs Evans.” The metaphorical “vanishing off the face of the earth” underscores Maguire’s wife absolute disappearance which complicates the process of tracing her. It is as if she relocated from earth to another planet where Jackie Maguire cannot reach her.
Food
Flanagan writes, “For many years, Dorrigo often thought about Mrs Jackie Maguire, whose real name he never knew, whose real name was like the food he dreamt of everyday in the POW camps-there and not there, pressing up into his skull, a thing that always vanished at the point he reached out towards it. And after a time he thought about her less often; and after a further time, he no longer thought about her at all.” The allegorical food accentuates Dorrigo's omnipresent unconscious memories of Mrs Jackie Maguire. Although she vanished during his childhood, her memories endure in Dorrigo's unconscious. Eventually, Dorrigo supressess her memories in totality.
