Stuck in An Imaginary Life

Realizing that this is a little past its time, here is my An Imaginary Life Essay...

As I read through An Imaginary Life by David Malouf, one recurrent theme that I noticed was this idea that there are levels to life and in particular the level of dreaming seems very relevant to our interpretations of life. However, it was not just in his dreams that he felt there were levels to life. In the fifth chapter as Ovid lied down to rest in the forest he expressed the observation that there were smaller levels to life as well, like the bugs and the earth. The more he started observing these levels the more I started making connections between them. In a way all of life, all of the earth, all of our relationships are connected in a set of stages and are tied together with our dreams.
The most basic stage is the stage at ground level, most literally. It is something that as people we don’t tend to think about very often but the earth and the ground level is why we are here, and how we are able to remain here. Without it we would not exist and in that sense we are apart of it. “The earth’s warmth under me, as I stretch out at night, is astonishing. It is like the warmth of another body that has absorbed the sun all day and now gives out its store of heat… and when I take a handful of it and smell its extraordinary odors I know suddenly what it is I am composed of” (Malouf 146).
The second stage is the stage of the feral Child, who is connected to the natural world in a way that most of us cannot understand. Able to survive the winters and flourish happily and communicate with the beast that roam the earth in complete harmony, he has a deeper connection with everything that is in and around his world, except humans. It is through the character of Ovid, however, that he begins to get a glimpse of both the beauties of our language, “Gradually, one sound at a time, we are finding human speech in him. It is a game he delights in” (Malouf 92) and the faults of civilization, “Out there he would freeze. Whatever his secret was, I have taken it away from him” (Malouf 114).
The third stage is the stage that our narrator, Ovid is in the majority of the novel; the level of human perception in culture and poetry. He is able to take a seemingly stressful situation (that of banishment) and transgress it into that of experience and change. His expression that life is how we change and the never ending process of change, is one that is both real and rarely observed. “Strange to look back on the enormous landscape we have struggled across all these weeks, across the sea, across my life in Rome, across my childhood, to observe how clearly the footprints lead to this place and no other” (Malouf 151).
The last, but seemingly important, stage is the stage of dreams that is expressed throughout the novel, by Ovid. He is very aware of the dream world and it ties together with the other stages that I have described. One of the more powerful analogies that he makes is with the natural world and how it is tied to the dream world. His idea that all things have been dreaming themselves into a new existence in a stadial progression, “Having conceived in our sleep the idea of a further being, our bodies find, slowly, painfully, the physical process that will allow them to break their own bonds and leap up to it” (Malouf 29). It is a very powerful way to interpret both how we dream and why we do it. From the natural world to the intelligence we find in humans, it is the subconscious expressed through our dreams that we are able to find novelty and originality.