The Theme of Exile and Reconciliation in David Malouf's An Imaginary Life

Philip Neilsen sees that in Malouf’s works ‘nationality’ or ‘Australian-ness’ are the most prominent among other preoccupations and also that his writings show a consistent concern with the exploration of historical influences upon a present consciousness’. In his fictional works Malouf’s Australia takes shape as a nation composed of migrants and also that Malouf’s Australia is a nation on the move, created and then repeatedly transformed by the process of migration. It can also be said that while in his first novel Johnno, Malouf gives us the ‘flesh’ of Australian exile, in An Imaginary Life he gives us the precise ‘bones’ of exile, of psychological descent, and of a form of spiritual reconciliation is the fictionalisation of the late life of the Latin poet Ovid, who spent his final years as a political exile in Tomis (contemporary Constanta). I would like to show through this paper that apparently though An Imaginary Life seems to talk of Ovid and his exile, in reality, through Ovid’s experience; it also retells the Australian myth of exile. It tells of the experience of the Australian settlers, who are in a state of exile from their homeland England. It is a sense of being separated at the edge of the world, away from the centre of things. And in Ovid’s ultimate acceptance of the harsh land and exiled existence, Malouf’s novel evokes for the reader the need for the contemporary Australians to identify with and have a better sense of belonging to Australia, than just belonging to a second-hand Europe