Thursday, March 25, 2010
Small town life
I spent most of the novel wondering why Henry, who so badly wanted to leave town and see the world, would instead remain the rest of his life. His revelations toward the end explained why he imprisoned himself there without a family of his own, but I wondered why he never visited (in such a small town) all the relevant sites of the Chatham School Affair or its other living victim, Alice Craddock. What do you make of that?
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6 comments:
I thought a couple of things: that he was punishing himself for "provoking" the string of deaths and also that the experience had simply sucked all the desire and brightness out of him, as in he had the will and spark to go on with his life but not to really LIVE it.
I thought he didn't revisit those old sites because he just had no need to, mainly. The pond was outside of town and the school had been converted to another use. He seemed to confront his demons just fine without physical confrontations! Not sure about Alice. Maybe he just couldn't bring himself to face her. I also got the sense that time slipped away from him, too, like it does with all of us as we age. Ten years go by before you know it, then 20, etc.
What did you make of his inability to forgive himself — to just accept that his romantic, youthful ideals led him to do something that had a "noble" intention but a tragic result?
You know, KC, that kind of reminds me of "The Last Picture Show."
Yeah, I can see that: boys with big dreams tragically tied to a town they only wanted to escape.
Yeah, and everything seemed so black and white to Henry. You either lived the rest of your life in a tiny village and never traveled or had any adventures, or you lived a "free," nomadic existence without ties to anything. Once the idea of living "at the edge of folly" was tainted for him, he seemed to give up the idea of LIVING at all.
Yeah, it was sort of a Great Gatsby moment. Once he realized that his great dream wasn't going to materialize, that his romantic ideal had been forever tainted, there was really nothing for him to do but die. Gatsby was shot to death in his pool after staking his whole life force on Daisy, and Henry died a figurative death in his small town.
Erin, I forgot about those quotes in the beginning (about living on the edge of folly), and I guess that was his way of more or less stating his outlook on life.
KC, I think that's true what you said about the desire and brightness going out of him. That's really such a tragedy -- to think of a mistake you make at 16 or 17 that haunts you for the rest of your life. Not even that society demands it be so but that a person can punish himself so thoroughly that it nags at him a lifetime later.
I wonder what would have happened if at any point he told his father about what he had done.
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