SOURCE: Vauthier, Simone. “Reading the Signs of Michael Wilding's ‘Knock, Knock.’” Australian Literary Studies 15, no. 2 (1991): 128–39.

In the following essay, Vauthier explores Wilding's narrative method in “Knock, Knock.”

Michael Wilding's Reading the Signs (1984) is a rich and varied collection of stories. Thematically, it counterpoints ‘accounts of a divided Old World’ (Clunies Ross 25)—relying on the writer's experience in Britain, before he emigrated to Australia—and stories which ‘reflect the divisiveness of modern Australian life’ (Clunies Ross 25). As far as narrative technique is concerned, it explores different ways, sometimes more ‘traditional,’ sometimes very innovative, of telling a story, which never fail to set up a dialectic tension between world and word. Although not one of the more elaborate or more resonant pieces, ‘Knock, Knock’ offers, with its ambiguity and allusiveness, its inversions and indirections, an attractive door into the writer's fictional space. Requiring horizontal and vertical readings, it obliges the...