Patrick White's chief interest throughout his novels has been on 'burnt ones', emotionally damaged people who lead a lonely existence without a lifeline to other lives. He is reluctant to portray his burnt ones as totally destroyed, but seeks to find for them a compensating value that might give their life some significance. Again and again, he portrays the force that supplements or transforms their blighted personal life as a richer life within the imagination. Those who do not or cannot attain a rewarding dream life, a life of conscious fantasy, White tends to endow with a visionary quality. (p. 152)
I use 'dreams' to designate the process of conscious fantasy…. Dreaming is a universal process, but when one's personal life is especially unsatisfactory, the dreams need to be richer, and they occupy a larger part of one's existence. Some form of dreaming—and mysticism itself can be seen as one form of dreaming—is necessary as an outlet or compensation for stark reality. When in The Aunt's Story Theodora Goodman's life in the ordinary world becomes unbearable, she elects a life completely within fantasy. Stan and Amy Parker, although emotionally undernourished, are not so burnt as Theodora; they do not dream so much as she does because they do not need to and also because they cannot, lacking broad and deep experience. Amy dreams more than Stan, and finds in dreaming some outlet for her frustration. Stan, similarly frustrated, represses his impulse to dream. What then is left in compensation to give significance to his life?
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