His mother had to suffer more when police captured her and Ned’s sister trying to blackmail the hero and make him give up. Ned came back from the prison to take up the criminal life and take revenge on the regime that tortured him and his compatriots and made his mother scream in despair: “God help us Jimmy what did we ever do to them that they should torture us like this?” (Carey 9). Since 12 Ned Kelly was brought up by his mother and took up the criminal pathway that allowed him not to know what famine was, but also led Ned to the term in prison for a fabricated accusation. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences…” (Carey 7). Red Kelly died in prison: “I lost my own father at 12 yrs. Here, he was also imprisoned never to come back from the jail. Ned was a son of a criminal, John “Red” Kelly who was imprisoned in Van Diemen’s Land and after doing his time moved to the Australian colony of Victoria. The story itself develops in the last half of the 19 th century in Australia, and is delivered by Ned Kelly from the first person. The story of the Irish Australian bushranger Ned Kelly has become paradigmatic for the selective retelling of history as folk legend, and for the ideological processes by which social memory may be reworked into the fabric of a nation’s founding cultural myths (Huggan 142).
The national spirit, together with the beliefs in “Robin Hood” who could make their lives happier, people admired criminals of those times, and Ned Kelly became a kind of the national hero and symbol of the Australian struggle for independence: The late 19 th century was the time when Australia, although still the British colony, started to rise against foreign rule and criminals who acted against governmental legislations were considered to be heroes among the ordinary citizens. The context of the book under consideration is the formation of the national identity of the Australian people. Major ideas of the book and metafictional strategies used by its author are main focuses of this paper which is going to find out the reality and fiction in Carey’s story about one of the national heroes of the Australian people. Peter Carey is skillful at usage of them in True History of the Kelly Gang all in order to make the work as realistic as possible but to preserve its artistic value as well.
Literature uses numerous devices to render objective reality and add artistic taste and color to it, among which integration of fiction and reality, i.
0 kommentar(er)
