Inspire and Expire: On Tim Winton's <em>Breath</em>

Abstract

ESCAPING THE MUNDANEAs retrospective tale, Breath opens with the narrator-protagonist, Bruce Pike (known as Pikelet) as paramedic arriving at the scene where teenage boy has hanged himself with autoasphyxiation. Unlike his younger colleague, with an ominous sense of foreshadowing, Bruce knows that it isn't suicide. Then the novel shifts to 11-year-old Pikelet, living in Sawyer, mill town not far from the mid-sized provincial city of Angelus and the coast, and his early friendship with the publican's son, Ivan Loon, (or Loonie), a mouthy urchin who roamed the town at will. For Bruce Pike, flashing back to his turbulent adolescence, the reader sees that his past has haunted him for years.Two friends, Bruce Pike and Loonie discover surfing, drawn to its intoxicating thrill in way that is new to them. boys are determined to throw off the stifling constraints of smalltown life, to escape the mundane, to transcend ordinariness, their high jinks a rebellion against the monotony of drawing (41). They engage in competitive feats of daring-seeing who can hold their breath underwater the longest, deliberately hyperventilating, and finally risking life.Curiosity and suspense are the two basic affects aroused by Winton's narrative. two boys hunt adventure with sort of desperation, hungry for the exhilaration of fear, the vitality of excess and extremity. Both endure their spills, but both want to achieve the highest success they can. sensitivities and vulnerabilities of adolescence are depicted here with deft and painful accuracy. When they meet mentor, Bill Sanderson (Sando), surfing maestro in his thirties, triangle of male yearning, rivalry, and betrayal develops. Through Sando, Pikelet, and Loonie meet, as it were, the fourth side of that triangle: Sando's wife, Eva.Sando is man who seems not to need to work for living, and who does nothing but surf. He is in fact also powerful surfer who knows the location of all the secret beaches and loves to take risks as much as they do. Under Sando's tutelage, the boys get to surf the legendary Old Smokey, Barney's Beach, and finally the Nautilus, where the fearsome waves are big enough to break rock cairn many miles off the coast and giant white shark is their sole observer. There is whiff of Hemingway's masculinist grace under pressure credo about this whole construct. Indeed, during one sermon Sando proclaims that denying fear is unmanly, and he takes the boys to surf Barney's, so he can make men of you.Loonie is reckless, dangerous, and the town's scapegoat for trouble. Pikelet attaches himself to Loonie with all the longing of boy who just wants friend, no matter how little the friendship is returned. However, Loonie's dysfunctional family life means he needs to prove himself, to have someone think he's worthwhile. He becomes more and more reckless out on the water, facing down twenty-foot waves with contemptuous defiance. As the waves they surf grow larger, the breaks more dangerous, Pikelet grows less easy with Loonie and Sando's patronage, until finally Sando and Loonie disappear overseas on surfing trip in Indonesia and Thailand.It is important to offer the female character Eva in contrast here, since she is, in an almost perverse sense, foil to the traditionally masculine in this novel. Sando's wife Eva, an American former champion freestyle skier with an irreversibly ruined knee from her last jump, feels herself to be nothing without the extreme thrill of her sport. I miss being afraid [. . .] That's the honest truth (178). Every young person wants to challenge himself; so Sando takes his disciple Loonie off to Indonesia and Thailand surfing. Eva, in her ennui, slips almost heedlessly into sexual relationship, something Pikelet believes is love and Eva sees as something quite different. During that period, he is consumed with self-loathing, convinced Eva holds him in contempt, too, but he later concedes, The disgust might have been reserved for herself' (172). …