Integrité

72 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal of view is only ever assigned to the eternal Fish—the narratorial ―I‖ indicates a subjective state that has transcended the shackles of time and space. Here there is still a disjunction between the ―I‖ and the ―you‖—the layers of reality that compose Fish‘s ontology and experience are discreet. But the narrative looks forward to their union, consummated in ―Moon ...,‖ when Fish‘s material self and subjectivity are enlarged into the eternal, perfect, fully-realised ―I‖: ―my walls are tipping and I burst into the moon, sun and stars of who I really am. Being Fish Lamb. Perfectly. Always. Everyplace. Me‖ (424).

The framing of Cloudstreet‘s narrative by the river and Fish‘s eternal voice shapes that which is enacted within the frame. Brady suggests that Winton directs attention ―to the frame, not for its own sake and not to the detriment of his characters and their word but to allow for their enlargement and enrichment‖ (11).

Enlargement and enrichment occurs through the characters‘ contact with the frame, symbolized by the river and embodied by the ―blackfella‖ and Fish, such that it changes their living in the world by orienting them to and giving them an expansive sense of ―home.‖ Stuart Murray comments, ―Allowing individuals to achieve the state of ‗being‘ that Fish attains, or even to recognise it as a possibility, Winton writes of a sense of place that possesses a resonance that goes beyond the simple geographies of family, house, street or river‖ (90). To elaborate, as Murray does not, this sense includes the noted resonance of Cloudstreet with Christ‘s depiction of heaven in John 14; similarly, Fish associates home with ―the Big Country‖ (192, 201)—the other reality accessed through the river, ―[a]ll that country below‖ (423). Towards the end of the narrative, Dolly and Sam debate selling Cloudstreet: Did you earn this place?

No. You know that. Joel gave it to me. Us. You think it‘s good luck to sell what someone gave you as a present, a gift? (407) Here, in order to persuade Sam against selling it, Dolly explicitly describes the house as a ―gift.‖ By this late point in the narrative, the biblically literate reader cannot help but note the biblical connotations of the term.

It is this broad, transcendental understanding of home that the ―blackfella‖ and Fish impart as a gift to the other characters as they urge them towards the physical manifestation of home as the site of belonging. Upon realising that ―[w]e belong to it, Quick,‖ (418) Rose, who has married the boy from across the corridor, wants to remain at Cloudstreet to enact life amid what she terms ―a new tribe‖—―I want to live, I want to be with people, Quick. I want to battle it out‖ (419). Given the novel‘s biblical framing, the new tribe calls to mind first, the Old Testament people of God—the tribes of Israel—and second, in the New Testament fulfillment of the Old, any who have received and believed in the gift of Christ (Rom. 9:6b-8) and consequently live in anticipation of the eternal reversal of the Fall and the relational wholeness it will usher in. Thus when the ―blackfella‖ appears to Quick three times and urges him to go home (210, 362, 367-8), he is orienting Quick to the final, eternal belonging for which Fish