Volltext - ub-dok: der Dokumentenserver der UB Trier - Universität ...

theatre where their expectations are shown to be crippled by inherited points of view which
often preclude any sensitivity for the limits of human acumen. They are all, along with the
protagonists, however, occasionally allowed to gain new points of view or shed their inhibiting
dramatic masks.
Neither Judith Wilkes nor Robert O’Brien achieve states of faith in non-knowing.
O’Brien at least is shaken enough in his preconceptions to begin doubting that which he
believed he knew. And while Wilkes rejects any such reversal, d’Alpuget’s other protagonists
are sometimes more successful. ‘The journeys that my characters make to the outer world are
at the same time journeys to an inner realm of the psyche’ d’Alpuget says, explaining that the
outer and inner confusion and chaos is simply ‘the state in which we, I believe, of the late
twentieth century, are trapped’, and are, therefore, shared by us all. ‘We must GROW to get
out of the pit we are in’, she writes in a statement that is certainly applicable to Koch’s world
as well, adding with insistence that ‘growth is painful’ (d’Alpuget, 74). Any considerate
reader of these novels must similarly be encouraged to take that first step into the circular path
of non-knowing, doubt and faith. Just how d’Alpuget and Koch consider this might be
accomplished will be fully discussed in following chapters, particularly those on the wayang
kulit and the Masks of the Personality.
- 131 -