The ‘Other-in-Self’: Love, Ecological Interconnectedness, and Socioemotional Vulnerability in Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

This article investigates Richard Flanagan’s latest novel The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020) through a psychological, philosophical, and ecocritical lens, focusing on how the author depicts an era of ecological crisis and social distancing. Written during the Covid-19 pandemics, Flanagan’s novel is a family drama about three middle-aged siblings that are facing their mother’s ordeal with a lethal disease in a context of climate change and related environmental catastrophes. Anna, whose point of view orients the narrative perspective, is repulsed by a human being’s hovering between life and death. Feeling uncomfortable while sitting at her mother’s bedside, she compulsively scrolls on her phone without paying attention to the images of burning forests and dead animals that fill her Instagram. Even when pieces of her own body begin to vanish because of an inexplicable fantastic phenomenon, she gets stuck in a state of psychoemotional paralysis. In my analysis of the novel, I will highlight how ecological issues are intertwined with the postcolonial discourse, and the personal histories of characters who experience different forms of alienation as a psychological state and social phenomenon. Drawing on philosophical concepts such as ecophobia, Ego- and Eco-resiliency, multidirectional eco-memory, and on the eco-ontology framework developed by Roberto Marchesini, I will discuss how Flanagan creates a fictional world in which ‘the Other in the Self’ is a key to prevent the physical and moral annihilation of the human.