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analysis that Billy is finally totally disillusioned and suicidal. While allowing, albeit without
clarification, that ‘it is only Billy Kwan who is capable of self-sacrifice that makes him a
martyr’, Balajee goes on to claim that his ‘size, his generosity, his enigmatic life and ultimate
death make him the anti-hero of the third world similar to the heroes of the absurd theatre’
(Balajee, 36-37).
Literary critics are generally willing to recognise how a writer like C. J. Koch is
attempting to create a ‘new myth’ with Eastern correspondences, but then seem bent on
shoving him back into the very Western tradition he is striving to escape. This much should be
writ large: Billy Kwan is neither a modernist anti-hero nor does he belong to the theatre of the
absurd. Yet Maack and Balajee are hardly alone. Felicia Campbell not only misrepresents the
wayang kulit sources Koch exploits in developing his characters, writing that Guy Hamilton is
fashioned after an ogre (Campbell, 166), but also declares that ‘as Billy moves to revenge, he
abandons the wayang imagery’ in favour of ‘the rigid dualism of Christian imagery’
(Campbell, 167). Rachel Ingalls, in critiquing the cinema version, justifiably deplores the
film’s cutting of Billy’s ‘deep need to believe in heroes, of his thwarted sexuality, his
voyeurism, his clinical approach to emotions he does not share, his compulsion to control
others and incapacity to deal with his own powerful emotions’. She concludes, however, that
without these elements there is little reason ‘why he should be the character who cracks’. Her
reading of the book version of his final act then is that Billy has ‘cracked’: ‘He makes a grand,
romantic gesture that is politically useless, and he knows it’ (Ingalls, 22). David Myers
concludes more dramatically that Billy Kwan is one of a type in the genre who must be a
sacrificial scapegoat ‘to appease the angry gods of revolutionary chaos and political or racial
violence’ in order to fulfil the ‘ambition to bridge the gap between East and West’, and that
‘Billy’s sacrifice inspires a moral enlightenment in the representative Australian journalist Guy
Hamilton’. This ‘central myth’ of a sacrificial scapegoat suggests ‘a new heroism and a new
dimension for the understanding of Australian national identity’, which ‘may now be formed
out of the tragic culture-clash between Australia and the Asia/Pacific’ (Myers, 28).
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