We feel not only that Lowry is hiding behind Plantagenet, but also that Plantagenet is hiding behind Ahab or Ismael, as types of lonely, doomed wanderers, and that it does little good to face one's trouble if one has to see that trouble as a white whale, or as the large pale hand of a puppeteer, or as a white seaplane buzzing about overhead. What would Lowry have been able to make of himself if, seated at Eric Estorick's kitchen table that hot August, he had instead been able to write, in unadorned, matter-of-facts prose, of his own horror at what he had seen, in himself as well ad at Bellevue?

Douglas Day, Malcolm Lowry. A biography, pag 212