Janet Frame Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Anna Grazia Mattei

Critical Essay by Anna Grazia Mattei

SOURCE: "'Two Sheep': A Fable," in The Ring of Fire: Essays on Janet Frame, edited by Jeanne Delbaere, Dangaroo Press, 1992, pp. 54-62.

In the following essay, Mattei interprets the story "Two Sheep" as an existential fable.

'Everything is always a story, but the loveliest ones are those that get written and are not torn up and are taken to a friend as payment for listening, for putting a wise ear to the keyhole of my mind', says the narrator-protagonist—who is, significantly, a writer—of 'Jan Godfrey', a story included in Janet Frame's first collection, The Lagoon. And the reader-friend who embarks on a story by New Zealand's most distinguished author, 'putting a wise ear to the keyhole of her mind', must be prepared to listen to disturbing things, things from 'that world' at the edge of the alphabet—the border-land between the imaginary and the real—often evoked in passages which strive...
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