SOURCE: "An Infinite Onion: Narrative Structure in Peter Carey's Fiction," in Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2, October, 1983, pp. 195-204.

In the following essay, Dovey remarks on the mythic qualities of Carey's fiction, focusing her analysis on Bliss.

It is a common practice of current literary critics to reveal how the subject matter of various literary works is in fact narrative itself, and from the structuralist perspective the process of creating the narrative is the only subject matter there can be. The increasing self-reflexiveness of post-modernist novels deals with the nature of narrative in a largely explicit manner, but Todorov claims [in The Poetics of Prose, 1977] that even the earliest narrative, the Odyssey, has as its theme 'the narrative forming the Odyssey'. So when I say of Peter Carey that his novel and his stories are concerned with the nature of narrative, and with the forms and functions of...