This story is full of elements that should be discussed—the mirror scenes, the connections, time, generations—but it is the narrator that most intrigues me. He is an emotional man who feels the advancement of his years bearing down on him; this is in part due to his decreased mobility and lack of elation and anticipation in his life. He is in a one-sided rivalry with Mr. Pike over his elm tree—a tree older than the Liberty Bell, he points out—and he feels that this is an “out with the old, in with the new” situation. However, Mr. Pike merely wants to protect his own young trees from the ant invasion, but the narrator doesn’t see it this way due to his limited understanding of Mr. Pike. And it is his foresightedness of Mr. Pike’s character that leads to the climax of this story.
Constellations
The narrator feels things deeply, and it is unique moments that bring him intense emotions. He says that
“…certain moments have always been peculiarly moving for me, and the mention of a century was one. There have been others…as couples and families converge on the concert hall from radiating footpaths…filled me with a longing…the spectacle of a thousand human beings organizing themselves into a single room to hear the quartets of Beethoven is as moving to me as birth or death. I feel the same way during the passage of an automobile across a cantilever span above the Mississippi…these moments overwhelm me.”
He is moved by abstract things and gestures, and by moments that seem mundane or inconsequential. He is not “overwhelmed” by people, and certainly not Mr. Pike. On the contrary, he describes his neighbor as “a thick and unpleasant man with whom I have rarely spoken.” The narrator acts on his feelings and sets out to, for all intents, exact revenge on Mr. Pike for having his beloved tree cut down. However, when he is in Mr. Pike’s bomb shelter and sees the man and his son outside, he becomes aware of his misunderstanding of Mr. Pike. He says that
“Then I realized that he was pointing out the constellations, but that he didn’t know what they were and was making up their names as he spoke. His voice was not fanciful. It was direct and scientific, and he was lying to his son about what he knew. “These,” he said, “These are the Mermaid’s Tail, and south you can see the three peaks of Mt. Olympus, and then the sword that belongs to the Emperor of the Air.” I looked where he was pointing…what he had actually described was Cygnus’s bright tail and the outstretched neck of Pegasus.”
This observation of Mr. Pike and his son are what prompt the narrator to look into their living room window. But why exactly did he do so? The narrator realizes that Mr. Pike shares his own love of astronomy and that there is now a connection between them. The narrator must have also wondered if—due to the public’s limited knowledge of constellations—Mr. Pike’s father had
been the one to teach him the names. After all, he does refer to them with authority despite the names being incorrect. Here again the narrator shares a connection with Mr. Pike—the narrator was taught the constellations by his father. Mr. Pike is teaching his son about them. With all this in mind, the narrator looks through the window. He says that
“Mr. Pike had his hand on Kurt’s shoulder. Every so often when they laughed at something on the screen, he moved his hand up and tousled Kurt’s hair, and the sight of this suddenly made me feel the way I do on the bridge across the Mississippi River.”
The narrator forgoes his act of revenge because he is filled with jubilation. He is invigorated by Mr. Pike and instead of looking to his tree, he turns instead back to the stars. Mr. Pike was a moment and a gesture that overwhelmed the narrator. In other words, Mr. Pike created beauty for him. As we see in the end, the narrator begins to instruct the newspaper boy on the stars, as his father did for him, and as Mr. Pike did for Kurt. The narrator becomes a renewed man, and it came from a person that he least expected.