Academic Writing
The Surviving Lambs
(**first three pages only)
by Lisa Shaw
In Tim Winton’s novel Cloudstreet, the author sets up the book with two very different, very flawed families – the Pickles and the Lambs. After their initial introduction, these two groups end up cohabitating in the same old, broken house, developing new manias and playing off one another’s affinity for extremes, all the while trying to raise their respective families. And while it is immediately apparent that both sets of relatives have deep-seated problems and societal issues, the Lamb family in particular can’t seem to fit in just right. Specifically, the main three Lamb frontrunners – Quick, Oriel, and Lester. Coincidentally, these characters all suffer from the same affliction that is commonly referred to as “survivor guilt” or “survivor syndrome.” The term “survivor guilt” is a fairly straightforward one, and generally refers to the “deep sense of guilt, combined often with feelings of numbness and loss of interest in life, felt by those who have survived some catastrophe. Survivors often feel that they did not do enough to save those who died or that they are unworthy relative to the perished” (Hirsch). Survivors usually have trouble dealing with life after experiencing these traumatic situations, and acquire a certain attitude of indifference towards people, events, and simply existence in general. Along with this tendency to feel apathy towards life, other behavioral alterations that a survivor might experience include: the developing of trust issues (or the complete inability to trust), overcontrol tendencies to compensate for lack of control in other aspects of life, an abnormal preoccupation with death, detachment from relationships, self-loathing, and becoming mentally stuck in past events with no outlook towards future goals. With all of these symptoms in mind, then, it is the Lamb trio that illustrates how survivor guilt can completely change aspects of an individual’s character, and impact one’s ability to establish and maintain healthy relationships with other people, both in and outside of their immediate family.
The character that suffers the most complicated and extreme case of survivor guilt is Quick Lamb, without question. Because of the integral role he played in his brother’s drowning, the dynamics of their relationship, and his young age at the time the event took place, Quick is the most affected. His reaction, directly implicit as a product of survivor syndrome, is stated clearly in the first few chapters of the novel, when Quick is alone in his room contemplating the accident, and thinks to himself, “...and his brother, Fish – the handsome kid, the smart kid who makes people laugh – Fish was under, and the net was just floating across him like the angel of death. He knew it should have been him, not Fish” (Winton 60). Instead of accepting the accident for what it was – an accident – Quick rations out most of blame to himself, truly believing that he has less of a right to live than his younger brother, who was everyone’s favorite. Because of Quick’s inability to deal rationally with the situation, it leads to acute character changes, including an unhealthy obsession with death. Dr. P.G. White, an expert on sibling loss and survivor syndrome, found that “the surviving sibling’s ideas about death may change as time progresses after the death. Some bereaved siblings said that the realization that death is part of life was a positive result of their experience with loss. Others became preoccupied with death, possibly as a way to master the trauma of loss.” Although Fish did not die in the medical sense, some essential part of the nine-year-old was lost during the drowning accident, leaving him with a mental handicap that renders him
infantile and affects his capacity to learn and interact. Unable to cope with these changes in his brother, Quick fixates all of his attentions on death, serving as kind of self-punishment. To fuel his morbid fascination, Quick resorts to combing through articles in the newspapers, looking for all kinds of stories that feature pictures of the unhappy, the wounded, or the dead. Winton describes the process in detail, noting:
Now and then [Quick] opens a [news]paper and sees a blinded prisoner of war or a crying baby or some poor fleeing reffo running with a mattress across his back, and he’ll tear it out with care, take it up to his private room and pin it to the flaky wall to remind himself that he is alive, he is lucky, he is still healthy, and his brother is not. When he works on his spelling assignments he looks up and sees the gallery of the miserable; it grows all the time and they look down at him, Quick Lamb the Survivor, and he knows he deserves their scourging stares. (61)
While it is assumed that Quick grows out of this particular method of dealing with the trauma of Fish’s misfortune, his preoccupation for the dead and the living remains present, revealing itself later in the novel in the form of Quick’s career choices.
At his first official job out in the bush, Quick is responsible for controlling the kangaroo population and keeping the animals off of certain parts of the land, specifically farming properties. Because he is such a good shot, the eldest Lamb excels at his new profession, but the intensity that he delivers with these executions indicate Quick’s underlying mania for life and death, and the ability to control life’s two extreme variables. At one point, when Quick is gunning down the kangaroos, he actually thinks of the living animals as “survivors”, and identifies them as such towards the end of the scene, when Winton writes: “When finally the survivors began to stagger away, Quick took fast shots, moving the spot with his elbow, until he was taking them down in their stride. ... He loaded up his gun again, left the light on, and went down among them, killing” (198). By exercising a God-like power over these creatures, Quick is able to recover some form of control and order in his life, deciding what lives and what dies, the one decision that he could not make as an adolescent during the infamous accident that destroyed his younger sibling. This element of power is also the deciding factor when Quick decides to become a police officer. After some questioning from Oriel as to why Quick chooses to pursue the police academy, her son offers the simple reasoning behind his decision, which is merely “to fight evil”, followed by the commentary “Quick thought of his room at Cloudstreet, the victims dancing on his wall, all the things there were to be stopped” (327). Although it manifests itself in a different form, Quick continues to suffer the effects of survivor guilt as a full-grown adult, preoccupied with the saving and taking of lives. His actions also fall directly under the assertion made by Dr. W. Niederland and then later by Dr. Y. Danieli, which states that:
Guilt presupposes the presence of choice and the power to exercise it. Survivor guilt may sometimes be an unconscious attempt to counteract or undo helplessness. The idea that one somehow could have prevented what happened may be more desirable than the frightening notion that events were completely random and senseless. (295, 458.)
Because Quick struggles with the notion of choice and power, as both Danieli and Niederland mention, he deals with this by taking choice and power into his own hands when he has the ability to, deciding the fate of animals out in the bush, and then again trying his hand as a God-like figure when he takes on the job as a police officer. Quick is never able to accept that he was in no way at fault on the fateful night, when his entire life changed right before his eyes. Not buying into the concept of random acts, Quick spends a good amount of his life attempting to offset and balance out what happened to Fish, and what he thinks should have happened to him.
-----------------------------------------------------
**This is the end of Page 3.
To continue reading, please view the full pdf version.**
