A Summary and Analysis of J. G. Ballard’s ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’ is a 1974 short story by the British writer J. G. Ballard (1930-2009). Ballard’s unique contribution to literature was to take the trappings of science fiction – space travel, new technologies, and the rest of it – and apply it to spaces and concerns closer to home. This story is a classic example.

Plot summary

The story is one of Ballard’s ‘anti-Robinsonades’, which take the idea of Robinson Crusoe – an individual being stranded on an island against their will – and invert it. Melville, the protagonist of this short story, is actively seeking out isolation on the Pacific isle known as Wake Island, an old WWII air base now being used as a refuelling point for long trans-Pacific flights.

Melville’s back-story is sketched in gradually, although the ending of the story invites us to question whether all of it is real, and whether part of it is mere fantasy and delusion on Melville’s part.

He’s an ex-pilot who (possibly) had a brief career as an astronaut, before apparently suffering a mental breakdown while in space (and possibly committing the first murder, too, when he saw a mysterious fourth figure in the spaceship). He’s recently been discharged from the mental hospital where he had been receiving treatment – including prolonged ECT treatment which has left him suffering from severe migraines – and he has come to a beach resort (presumably, given the reference to ‘the Channel’, situated on the south coast of England) to convalesce.

There, he meets Dr Laing (his name summoning both the Scottish psychiatrist of that name who wrote The Divided Self, as well as Dr Robert Laing, one of the main characters in Ballard’s High-Rise, which appeared a year after this story was published), who appears to want little to do with Melville, and only reluctantly gets involved with his crackpot plan of flying to Wake Island and marooning himself among its concrete runways.

When Melville discovers an intact WWII bomber plane on the island, he excavates it, intending to use it to fly to Wake Island. An aviatrix named Helen Winthrop turns up, intending to fly to Cape Town, but Melville becomes convinced that she will fly with him to his preferred destination. The two of them have a brief fling.

Melville continues to prepare the B-17 plane for his voyage, despite Laing’s warnings that he’s exhausting himself. When Winthrop flies off without him, he is unperturbed, and when Laing tells him a couple of weeks later that Winthrop died when her plane crashed in Nairobi, he continues to entertain his ‘dream of flying to Wake Island’.

Analysis

This story is a classic example of Ballard’s interest in what he called ‘inner space’ over outer space. Many of the essential ingredients of a J. G. Ballard short story are here: mental illness and delusion, dreams of flying, delusions (if they are delusions) of being an astronaut, the individual wishing to remove himself from civilisation and live somewhere isolated and remote.

As Ballard’s narrator notes (curiously, despite the title ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’, the story is narrated in the third person by a detached impersonal narrator, rather than by Melville himself), the protagonist’s past as a failed astronaut may be nothing more than an ‘extreme metaphor’ for his true dream of flight. Rather than wishing to explore outer space, Melville has his sights on somewhere closer to home.

In a memorable phrase, the narrator speaks of Melville wishing to make two journeys, one ‘externally to Wake Island, and [the other] internally across the planets of his mind.’ Ballard once said in an interview that the Moon Landing of 1969 marked an end of the dreams of space travel, rather than some bright new beginning.

But for Melville, Wake Island’s runways offer just that: a beginning. But why this Pacific stopover atoll offers the hope of a beginning, if only for Melville himself, remains unclear. Tellingly, his failed astronaut career (whether real or imagined) and the unearthing of the wartime bomber plane both take us back to earlier hopes of flight which are now no longer needed, if we grant that Ballard was right about the Apollo landings representing the end of space exploration.

Perhaps, then, Melville identifies Wake Island with a complete break from his past, whether real or imagined: the mental breakdown as an astronaut and his attendant failure at space travel can be forgotten if he successfully completes this flight mission to his new Eden.

It is clearly the flight itself rather than the island – the journey, rather than the destination, if you will – that matters. As Melville confides to Helen Winthrop, Wake Island exists as photographs which, true to Baudrillardian form, are more real than the island is itself, as far as he’s concerned. Note the title of the story: ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’, rather than ‘My Dream of Wake Island’. The flying part is what possesses the regenerative ability for Melville and his psyche.

It’s telling that this story was written in the wake of the final Apollo missions to land man on the moon, and that it was published the same year as Concrete Island, Ballard’s novel about another latter-day Crusoe who appears to embrace his isolation (on a traffic island on a London motorway, rather than in the Pacific).

The title of this story is pointed: ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’ suggests that Melville’s ambition will remain an unfulfilled dream, and sure enough this is how the story ends, with him still nurturing his dream of flying off for the Pacific atoll which, he acknowledges, is more real in the photographs he possesses (and in his troubled imagination) than it is in actual reality. The idea of the island is more important to him than the physical actuality of the place.