SOURCE: “An Indian Story: ‘The Twitching Colonel,’” in Patrick White: A Critical Symposium, edited by R. Shepherd & K. Singh, Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English, 1978, pp. 28-33.

In the following essay, Shepherd views “The Twitching Colonel,” one of White's earliest short stories, as a harbinger of themes that surface later in the author's fiction.

I wish to look at an early short story by Patrick White, “The Twitching Colonel,” which appeared for the first (and only) time in London Mercury in 1937 two years before Happy Valley in 1939. This story is of special interest for several reasons. It is a very early piece and quite unlike anything in the early novels, though, thematically, it anticipates the whole corpus of White's fiction concerning the nature of “reality.” My present interest lies with the special oddness of this story, its aura of Indian-ness in the way it reflects...