The Protagonist as a Learner, and the Author as a Teacher in Jack Lasenby’s Novel, The Lake

Abstract

The young adult novels of multi award-winning New Zealand writer, Jack Lasenby, are strongly influenced by his careers as a primary school teacher and deer-culler, and love of story. In his first novel, The Lake, Lasenby depicts Ruth, the protagonist, as a learner who seeks knowledge in much the same way that he, the author-teacher, crafts his work. Incorporating features of John Dewey’s Progressive Education system into the novel, Lasenby emphasises the interrelatedness of diverse characters, and of society, nature, and myth, the notion of a wholeness comprising integrated parts, and the possibility of a truth gained through experiential learning and the imagination. Alienated, oppressed, and lonely, Ruth has experienced parental neglect and abuse, and escapes from the social world to a recognisable fictional wilderness based on the New Zealand landscape of Lasenby’s deer-culling days. At the same time she sees in society and the landscape images that represent herself and her dysfunctional family, and comes painfully to terms with these. Lasenby’s allusions to Maori and Biblical myth add to the multiple perspectives that Ruth (and the implied reader) must resolve in order to arrive at some truth.