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to the faith she so sorely lacks. Unable to come to terms with her stereotypically constructed
self, she is condemned to be a lonely expatriate of the soul whose only comfort is the
materialism her modern world offers.
The focus of this study shifts further toward the Eastern mythopoeic structures and
themes in Chapter 7, ‘The Two Realms of the Wayang’. The wayang kulit, the Javanese
Shadow Theatre which is the central metaphor in Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously,
provides a complex formal basis which personifies the spirit of the intertwined Eastern
concepts of power, face, loyalty, and revenge. It represents reality on two levels: the illusory
material world, and the magically transcendent realm; and through this dual perspective the
main characters’ development through innocence, experience and maturity is observed.
The main characters of the wayang are the heroic Pandava brothers from the great Indian
epic poem, the Mahabharata, and the Javanese dwarf god, Semar. Koch has held that the
wayang kulit play The Reincarnation of Rama provided his novel’s structure, including the
prototypes for Hamilton and Kwan in Arjuna and Semar, but the most interesting and
illuminating aspects of his use of the wayang are found in his adaptation of the multiple levels
of narration, the musical accompaniment, and the complex continuum of personality types
which is fundamental to any character analysis of The Year of Living Dangerously.
Chapter 8, ‘The Divination of History and the Duality of Justice’, carries forth the
argument that a wholly Western critical approach to Koch’s Year of Living Dangerously is
doomed to error. Previous critical papers about Koch’s intertextual use of the Bhagavad Gita,
the sacred ‘Song of the Lord’ which is the archetype for the wayang kulit’s stories of Arjuna
and Krishna, the avatar of Vishnu, the Supreme God of Creation, are reviewed and themselves
criticised. Many are extremely useful, others betray weaknesses in their grasp of the pretexts,
and some are simply looking to ignore the Eastern archetypes altogether and to force a
classification of the novel as one form or other of late 20 th century Western literature.
This study argues that Koch has written a subtle, fantastic, and harrowing novel of the
apocalypse. History is torn away from the control of those who would make it into an
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