The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.”

Dorrigo is never shown to have any hope for his future, and most of his memories in the novel are bad ones. The closest he comes to happy memories are his times with Amy, but those are not peaceful memories. They are tinged with desperation, obsession, and the knowledge that the war will separate them. He is nothing but his past, and his past is unhappy. 

“No one reads anything anymore. They think Browning is a gun.”

Dorrigo laments to Lynette that the age of technology is producing people incapable of appreciating poetry and literature. This is one more way in which he feels isolated: He has fewer and fewer people to discuss books with. He is not merely out of place among other people but feels displaced from the very era in which he lives. 

“These days he relied on the increasingly fragile assumption that what he said was right, and what was right was what he said.” 

Dorrigo speaks to a journalist but does not pay much attention to what he is saying. Dorrigo speaks as if reading from a script because he knows what he is expected to say. He has a positive enough track record to assume that whatever he says will be regarded as true, and the rightness of it will be determined by the fact that it was he who said it. 

“Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is.” 

Dorrigo sees horror as a reality—as well as violence—that underlies everything in life. Horror is always there, waiting to be revealed, and it can only be revealed through the actions of people. The actions of people in the novel are often shown to be meaningless, which makes the horrors their actions produce equally meaningless. 

“A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.” 

Dorrigo searches for a book that he knows well, because it will make him revisit his own soul and study himself. He finds that he never learns anything about himself from mediocre—or even good—books. It takes a great book to prompt self-scrutiny. As Dorrigo ages, he continues to read, but he becomes less reflective and less given to examining himself

“Dorrigo Evans hated virtue, hated virtue being admired, hated people who pretended he had virtue or pretended to virtue themselves. And the more he was accused of virtue as he grew older, the more he hated it.” 

Dorrigo knows that he is not the same as the persona people have created for him. He is told he is virtuous but does not see himself that way. He comes to hate virtue itself, because he is constantly reminded of the gulf between what he considers himself to be, and truly virtuous people. 

“Duty to his wife. Duty to his children. Duty to work, to committees, to charities. Duty to Lynette. Duty to the other women. It was exhausting. It demanded stamina. At times he amazed even himself.” 

Dorrigo views his entire life as a meaningless duty. Even his pleasure—such as an infidelity—feels like duty to him. He remains aware of just how many things and obligations and women that he is juggling and knows that he is pulling off an impressive feat of energy. This is one of the few times in the novel that he expresses any positive feeling for his own abilities. 

“He reasoned that, as there was nothing he could do about his feelings, he must avoid acting on them.” 

For a while, Dorrigo resists the idea that he will go to Amy, but he does not try to feel differently. He assumes that his feelings cannot be changed. The fact that he will not stop thinking about her is a guarantee that he cannot stop feeling desperate to see her. His avoidance will have an expiration limit, and he knows his willpower will not last. 

“The more people I am with, Dorrigo thought, the more alone I feel.” 

Loneliness is a prominent theme throughout the narrative. When Ella thinks that she cannot imagine life without loving people, and being around people, Dorrigo thinks the opposite. The more people he is around, the most aware he becomes of his lack of connection. Sometimes he even feels that he is the one who connects other people to one another, and that he is the only one who can’t find something to enjoy about himself. 

“My disgraceful, wicked heart, thought Amy, is braver than the world. For a moment it seemed to Amy that there was nothing in the world she could not meet and vanquish. And though she knew this to be the most foolish idea, it excited and emboldened her further.” 

Amy is ashamed of her infidelity, but she is also proud of her willingness to chase her own desires. Pursuing Dorrigo is an act of defiance and courage for her because she knows that she will pay a price if her husband catches her. She also knows that she is being irrational, and that the emboldened nature she feels is most likely due to the adrenalin of recklessness and lust, not bravery. 

“All men were liars and he was no doubt no different—only one tongue and more tales than the dog pound.” 

Amy watches Dorrigo and knows that he is probably no different than other men. This makes her wonder why she is so drawn to him. She knows that he is capable of lying to her, and of boasting, but she cannot imagine not being with him. It also shows that Amy has come to distrust men entirely, although the reasons have not yet been given.

“They lived in them all or they died and every man with them; they had come to believe that to abandon one man was to abandon themselves.” 

Even though he temporarily hates Tiny, Darky begins to help him because he thinks they are all responsible for each other. It is as if they have become one organism, united in their suffering, and one man feels it when another is hurt. In time, the men come to believe that they are bonded to each other in a way that no one outside of their suffering could imagine. 

“Memory's only like justice, because it is another wrong idea that makes people feel right.” 

Memory is another prominent theme throughout the narrative. Dorrigo argues with Bonox about burning the sketchbook, as Bonox maintains that memory is the true justice. Dorrigo believes that memory is so likely to be wrong and distorted that it can only lead to misplaced certainty. If justice is pursued based on memory, then the justice will also be distorted. 

“Fuck God for having made this world, fucked be His name.” 

At Hendrick’s funeral, Dorrigo is ashamed to hear himself uttering religious platitudes that he does not believe in. He has grown hostile towards God, and the POW camp seems to Dorrigo to be the clearest example of why any God who created this world could not be worthy of worship. It is yet another example of a moment where Dorrigo acts the way he is expected to act, rather than how he actually feels. 

“It's only our faith in illusions that makes life possible. It's believing in reality that does us in every time.” 

Dorrigo says this to Squizzy and considers it the most accurate description of himself and his life that he has ever heard. He compares to Don Quixote, who was always willing to charge the windmill, despite being delusional. Dorrigo is aware that he survives on his illusions, which forces him to simultaneously acknowledge that he is unlikely to be ever be fulfilled since the illusions that keep him going cannot be realized. 

“For an instant he thought he grasped the truth of a terrifying world in which one could not escape horror, in which violence was eternal, the great and only verity, greater than the civilizations it created, greater than any god man worshipped, for it was the only true god. It was as if man existed only to transmit violence to ensure its domain is eternal. For the world did not change, this violence had always existed and would never be eradicated, men would die under the boot and fists and horror of other men until the end of time, and all human history was a history of violence.” 

Dorrigo watches Darky’s beating. He believes that violence will always exist, and it will always require men to keep it alive. He sees it as the only true God because violence appears to Dorrigo to be the only eternal principal and reality. There is no history that does not include violence. 

“For the Line was broken, as all lines finally are; it was all for nothing, and of it nothing remained. People kept on longing for meaning and hope, but the annals of the past are a muddy story of chaos only.” 

Shortly after the end of the war, the Japanese abandon the railway. In Dorrigo’s view, every life is a line that will eventually break, and to long for meaning and hope is to ignore this fact. The suffering on the Line was rendered meaningless when the project did not see its way to completion. 

“Humans are only one of many things, and all these things long to live, and the highest form of living is freedom: a man to be a man, a cloud to be a cloud, bamboo to be bamboo.” 

This quote is at odds with the Japanese philosophy espoused by Nakamura. He believes that freedom is not required for progress, and progress on behalf of duty is the highest form of living. Longing to live should be a desire subservient to the desire to glorify the state and build the Empire. 

“He could never admit to himself that it was death that had given his life meaning.” 

As Dorrigo tries to transition back into civilian life, he tries to ignore the inconvenient reality of the quote above. The camps were misery for the men and killed many of them, but it was only in the presence of such misery that Dorrigo had felt that his life mattered. There, he shouldered a responsibility with significance, and his decisions and actions had more import. 

“Maybe we just get given our faces, our lives, our fate, our happiness and unhappiness. Some get a lot, bugger all. And love the same. Like different glass sizes for beer. You get a lot, you bugger it all, you drink it and it’s gone. You know it and then you don’t know it. Maybe we don’t control any of it. No one makes love like they make a wall or a house. They catch it like a cold. It makes them miserable and then it passes, and pretending otherwise is the road to hell.” 

The trucker compares love to a cold, something to be succumbed to. He also postulates that love might be a finite commodity in each person. Unlike Dorrigo, however, the trucker is not disparaging the idea of love. He is saying that before it can be enjoyed, it has to be talked about realistically, including a discussion of the problems love can lead to. 

“He was a lighthouse whose light could not be relit.” 

Dorrigo sees his life after the war as more meaningless than before. The fact that he had seen himself as a lighthouse previously means that he thought he had at least some purpose; a lighthouse serves to provide guidance and safety. In the absence of the pressure and demands of the POW camp, Dorrigo realizes that his life as a civilian cannot rekindle the purpose he had served while in the presence of constant death. 

“In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss.” 

Dorrigo has spent much of the novel trying to forget about Amy, or to distract himself from her. When he finally begins to lose his memories of her, the realization wounds him. he begins to see that mental time spent in the past is to be absent from one’s real, present life, and this serves as a reminder of how much time has been lost, which exacerbates Dorrigo’s regrets.

“How empty is the world when you lose the one you love.” 

Despite his inability to define love, Dorrigo feels empty after passing Amy on the bridge without speaking to her. He thought she had died, and so he had been able to move on to an extent and forget her. When he saw her alive, the progress of his forgetting was undone. Now he has lost her twice, and the world feels emptier to him than it ever has.