The Year Of Living Dangerously By Jill Ker Conway: Literary Analysis
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Written by Jill Ker Conway, The Year of Living Dangerously is a book about historical events from a first hand point of view. The novel teaches the reader about the political culture of Indonesia, a topic with which most are unfamiliar. It is about companionship, eminence, desire and conclusively deception. The reader may notice a theme of Postcolonial Theory within the text. The Postcolonial Theory comes from a period where the colonized people were searching for their own identity and fulfillment of dreams in the face of oppression from another cultural influx. Postcolonial Criticism “is interested in discovering how the colonized came to accept the values of the more powerful culture (mimicry) as well as resist the colonizers." Thesis three, the monster is a harbinger of category crisis and thesis five, the monster polices the borders of the…show more content… The monster is a harbinger of category crisis implies that monsters cannot be categorized. They do not follow the rules human nature and they tend to push the boundaries of comfort when they push into unexpected places. In the Postcolonial Theory, there is a sense of not fitting in or double recognition. For example, in The Year of Living Dangerously, the narrator stated “Now I was in a more diverse social universe than I had known at Coorain. I had no idea how to behave or what the rules were for managing social boundaries.” This goes to show how the colonized had dual perspectives of the world. The two perspectives include views of the colonizer and views of the individual themselves. The character is then unsure of which culture they belong to because neither one gives them the comfort of home. One of the characters in the novel even claimed, “How do I manage to belong to a culture I never grew up in? In this case the characters do not feel they belong to either culture. Readers will then find that writers don't refer to cultures similarly. As a result Conway got his Australian education