AustLit

The story of Voss has epical implications, is ‘doctrinal to the nation.’ Voss is a public man, his task being to discover and open up for the whole people the meaning of this new continent to which he is drawn. Like Moby-Dick and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with which it challenges comparison in the American tradition, Voss is about the search for new kinds of value, about the tension between the individual will and the collective order. Like these works, the story of Voss arises from an experience of ‘imaginative desocialization,’ the experience from which Quentin Anderson argues, the heroic quest of the new world takes its beginning. Voss is an outsider, alienated from the world from which he came as well as in the new world society where he feels himself awkward, unable to accommodate himself. He is drawn to Australia as if to his destiny, to prove possibilities within himself that depend not on the old world question, ‘what role shall I be given?’ but on the new world question, ‘what world am I to possess.’ (Extract from article.)