The marionettist or puppeteer motif

In "Whatever Happened to Coppelius? Antecedents and Design in Christina Stead's The Salzburg Tales," Michael Ackland writes about "the puppet motif" in the first of Salzburg Tales' short stories, The Marionettist. This is a pdf file.

He writes:

In recasting the marionettist or puppeteer motif, Stead could draw on an extensive tradition that used the puppet theatre as a metaphor for commenting on human existence and authorship.

She mates the mythic with the actual

The Pykk blog glances at the first lines of The Salzburg Tales.

The blogger writes:

... as in the first lines of Seven Poor Men of Sydney, she mates the mythic with the actual. In this book the mythic is to the fore.