Various Types of Ambiguities in Patrick White's Riders in the Chariot

The "ambiguity" in the novels of Patrick White is exhibited on various levels: White's style, that is, his peculiar way of organizing and giving form to his artistic material, that constant attitude of his prose that matches the issues of his time, is "ambiguous" in that its distinctive feature is the use of a mixed point of view, extended by the author's frequent intrusions in introducing ironical remarks on the eventual achievements of the characters' spiritual quest. White does not provide the reader with a general solution, a panacea to the human condition, he rather dramatizes it in such a way as to focus the problem. His prose, a combination of symbolic and naturalistic writing, aims at communicating the various levels of experience and the flux of life, the "extraordinary behind the ordinary", as he defined it. As a whole, it is a poetic prose, whose traits are detectable in its complex syntax, a frequent use of the conditional mode to suggest hypothetical possibilities beyond the mere gesture, of broken sentences; the tenseness and concentration of meaning are acquired by the reduction of logical nexus and by a network of interwoven images expanded in all their possible inferences through a symbolic technique that continually shifts from a naturalistic to a symbolic plane, investing the objects with a mysterious life and meaning.