Choice and Fate

Choice and Fate names a central tension in Dorrigo Evans’s life: people are required to choose, yet they act within circumstances they did not choose and cannot fully command. The tension takes sharply different forms in his missed encounter with Amy Mulvaney on the Sydney Harbour Bridge and in the wartime decision over prisoners facing death. One moment turns hesitation into an irrevocable personal loss; the other makes even deliberate action morally compromised.

The Limits of Choice

The novel gives the question of agency its clearest expression after Dorrigo and Amy have walked past each other without speaking. He has been moving towards her, arguing inwardly both that he must not intrude upon her life and that they might still begin again. When the encounter passes, he recognizes that he has misjudged her, himself, their past, love, and time. He cannot make himself turn back until he reaches the other end of the bridge. By then, Amy is nowhere to be seen.

The delay matters because this is not simply a meeting prevented by circumstance. Dorrigo has a moment in which he believes he must decide whether to call out, and he imagines doing so; the opportunity disappears while he is still caught between incompatible impulses. His later realization that he should have stopped Amy does not restore the choice. Standing amid the people flowing around him, he thinks of Lot’s wife and reverses the lesson he sees in the story: he should have turned and looked back, but now he cannot. The crowd’s movement makes his stillness seem almost incidental, while the consequence for him is absolute.

Yet the scene does not settle the matter as a simple moral lesson about indecision. Dorrigo asks whether he chose, whether Amy chose, whether either had a choice at all, or whether life swept them together and then apart. The questions leave open the relation between personal responsibility and forces larger than an individual decision. His failure to call out is real, but so is the vast distance of time and the separate life Amy has lived. His regret cannot establish what would have happened if he had acted. The missed encounter is therefore both a choice he believes he made and an outcome whose alternative remains unknowable.

The Encounter with Amy

The force of the meeting comes from the collision between elapsed time and returning feeling. More than a quarter of a century after Dorrigo first saw Amy in an Adelaide bookshop, he is astonished that her changes matter so little to him and that feelings he thought lost return with their former intensity. Seeing her with children, he recognizes features he takes to be unmistakably hers, while the signs of a life beyond him pain him. He considers that she may be happy in her marriage, even as he struggles to breathe and imagines that the two of them might start again.

As they draw close, a necklace awakens memory. Dorrigo sees Amy adjust her dress and briefly anticipates that she might welcome him into her life. Instead, they pass in silence. The sequence sets expectation against outcome: the light and the familiar object seem to open a way back to the past, but neither can alter the present. When Dorrigo finally turns at the far end of the bridge, he finds only her absence. His later thought that the world is empty when the person one loves is lost gives the missed moment its emotional finality without claiming that the encounter could have repaired what time had changed.

Wartime Choice Under Coercion

The wartime dilemma makes the same question of agency more brutal. Through Lieutenant Fukuhara, Major Nakamura indicates that choosing prisoners for the railway would save the Japanese army rice. Dorrigo understands that if Nakamura selects the men, the sickest may be included indiscriminately—or even targeted because they are least useful—and that all selected men may die. If Dorrigo makes the selection, he can choose the fittest, whom he believes have the best chance of surviving. Most will die anyway. The decision is framed as whether to refuse assistance to an agent of death or become his servant.

Here, unlike on the bridge, Dorrigo’s decision is not between speaking and remaining silent in an uncertain personal encounter. It is a constrained choice inside captivity, where the conditions and likely deaths are imposed by another power. Choosing the men with the best chance of living might improve some prisoners’ prospects, but it also means taking part in selecting them. Refusal avoids that complicity but leaves the selection to Nakamura, with the sickest especially vulnerable. The passage supplies the dilemma, not a clean resolution that would make either path innocent.

Fate Without Release

The two situations resist an easy division between free choice and fate. On the bridge, Dorrigo’s hesitation has a consequence he cannot reverse, but he cannot know what an attempted reunion would have meant for Amy or for either of them. In the camp, his available actions are narrowed by coercion and death, yet the difference between his possible selection and Nakamura’s remains consequential to the prisoners. Choice matters, but it does not grant mastery over outcomes or erase the conditions under which a person acts.

The novel’s questions therefore hold responsibility and helplessness together. Dorrigo feels that he should have stopped Amy, while also wondering whether life simply carried them apart; in the camp, he confronts the burden of acting when every alternative involves harm. Neither scene turns fate into an excuse that settles the moral question. Instead, each shows what remains after the moment for action has passed: regret where an encounter cannot be recovered, and an unbearable burden where no decision can prevent the larger violence.