Patrick White Essay

Patrick White is the best known among the modern writers of Commonwealth Literature. He has achieved universality through his major novels with their epic themes and their poetic treatment. White, who comes of a pioneering Australian family, is pre-occupied with the Great Australian Emptiness in his middle novels particularly in Voss (1957). White is fascinated by the notion of the pure being which is a feeling of oneness with the whole creation. White has a unifying vision of life and believes that Unity could be achieved in a coherent cosmos. White can be seen both as a local writer, critically engaged with his society, and as a universal writer whose concerns can be described as unbounded by place and time. In his works, we can see an …show more content…
It is a spiritual exploration with a religious theme of suffering man finding salvation in the wilderness. The image of the Mandala is used, here, as a framework comprising the land and the sky and Voss is placed at the centre of it. Towards the end of the novel a great comet appears which Voss finds beautiful and desirable. It is again Mandalic. Voss attains humility and simplicity, and accepts his natural human …show more content…
It can be studied as a story presented at two levels: the record of the expedition of Voss, the German explorer, and, symbolically, a soul’s pilgrimage and penetration into an unchartered region of experience. The novel’s basic image is that of the voyage of discovery as an exploration of the self, the nature of man and his relationship with the world.
Hillary Heltay connects Voss’s journey into the heart of the desert with his journey to the knowledge of the self. The struggle against drought, flood, hunger, thirst, mutiny among his men and enmity from natives corresponds the spiritual struggle to reconcile the pride and humility, the good and evil, the almost human and superhuman within his soul. Voss is accompanied in spirit by Laura in whom he recognises an inhabitant of the same spiritual