The story begins by telling us about a troubled year when a 16-year-old boy’s life changed forever.His life is depicted as relatively stable. His father worked on for rail line while his mother passed through as a waitress in town. Everything seemed to function as a normalized familiar unit.
The father is characterized as being controlling and fearful of the outside world.From the narrators descriptions we can see that the farther had made the mother stop working due to the town being “on a decline”. Saying it wasn’t “as safe” as it once had been.This is where the isolation of the family by the father must have begun.I believe that the father had always held controlling intent towards his family as he cut the mother off from the outside world and she seemed to only be allowed to have people over while he was away.
The father eventually comes to a sort of “breaking point.” I believe with his slowly slipping grip of control on his life he snapped. The economy is doing poorly, his job is at stake, and money is becoming more and more scarce. I think this is why seeing the homeless man die must have taken such a large toll on his psyche.He was very much so used to being in control. So when he lost that sense of security, weather that be a fear of economic stability, death, or losing his family we don’t know.
Him, already being in a vulnerable and emasculated spot, just couldn’t handle another man criticizing him in front of his family. This encounter broke him and he was lead to relieve the stress he had been holding and reclaim his control over his life in anyway he knew how. This way being to kill Boyde. In response to his own actions, he blames his wife for carrying on a secret affair. Claiming he did it because Boyde loved his wife.
You can see in these actions alone that the father craved control and power over his and his families lives. It seems to have never been a problem since before he was the bread winner and there was very little power struggle in the families dynamic. But you can see through the mothers actions that she doesn’t care much for her husband. She never defends him or speaks up for him, unlike penny. She shows very little concern for his mental state. I believe the mother was only with him for convenience and had convinced herself that she felt love for him.
The mothers reactions in the ending scene can also be interpreted as the mannerism of a person who has existed a narcissistic partnership. You can see that the mother is guilt riddled from the whole experience and is having a difficult time rationalizing the past situation to herself, despite it being multiple years ago.She has seemingly moved on and is with a new man. She then begins to talk about the father. She asks if the son has visited him and says she hasn’t even tried.She mentioned how she and the father were just “not made for each other” and how they “collided” a lot. She then comes back after leaving the shop to ask her son if he knew that she wasn’t in love with Boyde. You can see how much this has worn on her and how the fathers consent insinuation that she was in love with him and how that had inherently forced him into action had eaten away at her over the years. She had been so concerned with this thought she wanted to make sure her son didn’t think that way as well.