So Long, See You Tomorrow

“What I felt about his ‘affliction’ was tucked away in my unconscious mind (assuming there is such a thing) where I couldn’t get at it.”

This passage continues the Freudian allusion introduced in the prior quote. The narrator’s older brother has an artificial leg as a result of a carriage accident. Because the boys never discuss the “affliction,” any feelings or associations with it are buried deep in the narrator’s psyche. Freud’s idea of the unconscious is one of his most lasting contributions to psychology. Toward the end of the novel, the narrator describes “lying on an analyst’s couch” in the present day (131), affirming his engagement with psychoanalysis. The direct references to Freudian language and ideas are part of Maxwell’s characterization of the narrator. They also alert the reader to underlying Freudian themes like doubleness, alienation, transference, and melancholy, suggesting the rich potential of a psychoanalytic textual analysis.

“And looking at these faded snapshots I see, the child that survives in me sees with a pang that—I am old enough to be that man’s father, and he has been dead for nearly twenty years, and yet it troubles me that he was happy. Why? In some ways his happiness was at that time (and forever after, it would seem) a threat to me. It was not the kind of happiness that children are included in, but why should that trouble me now? I do not even begin to understand it.”

The narrator’s sense of disconnection from his father haunts him into old age and feeds his sympathy for Cletus. Children’s struggle to understand their parents is a theme running throughout the story. The narrator does not understand why an adult’s happiness feels like a threat to him. Perhaps it is because Lloyd said that his affair with Fern made him happy for the first time in his life, yet that happiness lead to violence and tragedy.

“What we, or at any rate I, refer to confidently to as memory—meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion—is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.”

Maxwell conflates memory with storytelling and both with lying. This self-aware stance frames the novel as a work of metafiction, a story about stories. The narrator is about to begin his “lie” about the past, a work of memory and imagination he knows to be fiction but which the reader will find loaded with truth.

“When I was a child I told my mother everything. After she died I learned that it was better to keep some things to myself. My father represented authority which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding.”

Father and son relations in the book are colored by silence, misunderstanding, and alienation. The narrator describes an archetype of Midwestern patriarchy: the father as a quiet authoritarian (the “strong silent type”) who provides security but also instills fear. The death of the narrator’s mother—and her replacement by his stepmother—disrupts his nuclear family. Cletus will later experience a broken household and the death of a parent as well. Yet the boys never find the will to communicate about their shared experiences, leaving the narrator with lifelong regrets. The silences of the fathers have been visited on the sons.

“In the course of time the details of the murder passed from my mind, and what I thought happened was so different from what actually did happen that it might almost have been something I made up out of whole cloth.”

This sentence reinforces the narrator’s previous association of Memory and Fiction. The original details of the murder have faded, but he will repeatedly create details in his imagined reconstruction of the past. Recurring paragraph-long sections of detailed images create a cumulative visual impact that makes the “lie” of the past believable to the reader.

“The only photograph I have ever seen of him, or of Lloyd Wilson, was printed on the front page of the Courier-Herald. Since it is a photostatic copy, black and white—or rather, brown and white—are reversed. Even so, they look enough alike to be taken for brothers. No doubt Cain and Abel loved each other, in their way, quite as much as, or even more than, David and Jonathan.”

Maxwell makes a biblical allusion to Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, a foundation of intrafamilial violence that has cast a long shadow over literary history. In the Book of Genesis, God discovers the killing and tells Cain that he has poisoned the soil with his brother’s blood and is cursed to never till the earth again. The agricultural consequences for Cain resonate with Maxwell’s story of tenant farmers whose relationships with the land are spoiled by betrayal and homicide. Additionally, the allusion serves to support the story’s thematic exploration of Family Instability and Its Effect on Children.

“Between the time that Cletus and I climbed down from the scaffolding and went our separate ways and the moment when he was confronted with the broken gun in the sheriff’s office, he must have crossed over the line into maturity, and though he is referred to as a boy, wasn’t one any longer.”

Violence and trauma precipitate Cletus’s loss of innocence. The temporal disruption of a boy aging too soon is represented by Maxwell’s mixed tenses “is referred to” but “wasn’t.” The boys part ways from a symbolic location, the scaffolding on the narrator’s new house. Houses are symbols of family integrity throughout the novel. While the narrator’s family is being reconstructed after his mother’s death, Cletus’s is further deconstructed by his mother’s infidelity and his father’s suicide.

“It was as if his father had shot and killed him too.”

Maxwell’s blunt assertion about Cletus captures the traumatic repercussions of Clarence’s violence. The narrator finds that he has no desire to seek out Cletus when he disappears from school. Cletus’s boyhood self is dead, and the narrator implicitly understands that Clarence’s actions are what killed him. Maxwell maintains a focus on the way that adult desires and dramas shape the lives of innocent children.

“They did not consider a tenant farmer their social equal, any more than a carpenter or a stonemason or a bricklayer. The farmer who owned the land he farmed they could and did accept.”

Land ownership is the conveyer of elevated class status in the agricultural Midwest. Clarence and Lloyd are both tenant farmers and experience uncomfortable relationships with their landowners. Maxwell notes that farming is not looked down on, as land-owning farmers are recognized as the equals of absent owners. The class dynamics of owners and tenants are analogous to the tensions between urban and rural communities in a landscape rapidly trending toward urbanization.

“The reader will also have to do a certain amount of imagining. He must imagine a deck of cards spread out face down on the table, and then he must turn one over, only it is not the eight of hearts or the jack of diamonds but a perfectly ordinary quarter of an hour out of Cletus’s past life.”

Maxwell’s narrator again alerts the reader to his metafiction, this time enlisting the reader’s imagination to corroborate the elaborate “lie” of the past. The act of imagining is visualized through the deck of cards metaphor. This image conjures loaded associations of luck, bluffing, randomness, and fate. These varied meanings all pertain to the imagined past Maxwell is beginning to show the reader, one card at a time.

“The attraction between dogs and adolescent boys can, I think, be taken for granted.”

The narrator’s first outright invention is a dog for Cletus, named Trixie. The explicit association of the boy and the dog in this quote presages Maxwell’s poignant dog’s-eye view of the Smith family’s broken home in Chapter 8. Trixie’s confusions and misinterpretations are superimposed onto Cletus’s perceptions until the two are interchangeable.

“Even if his father, after working these acres for twelve years, doesn’t feel the emotion of ownership, Cletus does.”

Maxwell highlights the significance of this line in the title of Chapter 5: “The Emotion of Ownership.” Theoretical and economic terms for class alienation are not available to Cletus, but he intuits it on the level of feeling. He is embarrassed by the way that the landowning Colonel speaks to his father and refers to the farm in the possessive (“my oats” and “my drainage ditch”). Maxwell demonstrates how macro-level divisions of class can materialize as micro-level divisions within families.

“Since the preacher said that the point of the parables is mysterious and needs explaining, they have no choice but to believe him. The details—the great supper, the lost lamb, the unproductive vineyard, the unjust steward, the sower, and the seed sown secretly—they are familiar with and understand.”

In the Gospels, Jesus uses parables (metaphorical narratives) to convey his teachings. In the Gospel of Mark, he explains to his disciples that the deeper meanings of the parables will be accessible to one who has faith in him. The preacher’s claim of a privileged understanding seems to suggest a misunderstanding of Christ’s purposes as a storyteller. However, the churchgoers know the parables: Maxwell selects specifically agrarian themes that resonate with his narrative, especially in the double entendre of “the seed sown secretly.” These terms also recall the prior allusion to Cain’s murder of Abel and the agricultural curse that followed.

“He said silently (but nevertheless wanting to be heard) Clarence, you ought not to trust me […] half expecting Clarence to answer Why not? If Clarence had, then he would have said Because all my life I’ve been a stranger to myself.”

Lloyd’s half-hearted attempt to give himself away indicates his sense of guilt. His feeling of being “a stranger to himself” exhibits his self-alienation, a symptom of the doubleness that haunts multiple characters in the novel. This theme aligns with Freud’s theory of the Doppelganger (a physical manifestation of a dissociated part of the self) thereby extending the allusions to Freudian theory in Chapter 1.

“Instinct told him that it would end badly.”

During Lloyd’s first kiss with Fern, he has a premonition of disaster. He is perhaps familiar with biblical stories of sexual transgression leading to downfall. In a traditional story, this would be foreshadowing. Here, it draws attention to Maxwell’s nonlinear narrative which reveals the denouement at the beginning.

“The memory of making love lay like a bandage across the front of his mind, day and night.”

The simile of a bandage connotes woundedness and temporary relief, something to stop the bleeding. Behind the dressing of memory are the pain of guilt and the desperate, disordered thinking of man estranged from himself. The soothing memories Lloyd is now experiencing will later harden with the realization that he and Fern can never marry.

“When there is no answer the barber is not offended. People either answered prying questions, in which case you found out something you didn’t know before, or they ignored them and if you bided your time you found out the answer anyway. Friends no longer, he remarked to himself. And then his eyebrows rose because of what he saw in the mirror: the boy was blushing.”

Clarence offers no response to the barber’s question about his friendship with Lloyd. But in this small Midwestern community, silence can be a subtle form of communication; the barber is fluent in this language. Cletus’s blushing face speaks volumes. The mirror is a symbol of duality. The embarrassed boy will soon be transformed by his father’s violence into a new person aged beyond his years.

“He did not recognize the description of himself, and he wondered how Fern’s lawyer could utter with such a ring of sincerity statements he must know had no foundation in truth.”

The self-alienation that plagues Lloyd has infected Clarence: He no longer recognizes himself. Or, at least, he doesn’t recognize the version of himself being presented in court. Like Cletus in the barbershop, Clarence is presented with a mirror image that reveals more than he can comprehend.

“It would have been a help if at some time some Baptist preacher, resting his forearms on the pulpit and hunching his shoulders, had said People neither get what they deserve nor deserve what they get. The gentle and the trusting are trampled on. The rich man usually forces his way through the eye of the needle, and there is little or no point in putting your faith in divine providence. […] On the other hand, how could any preacher, Baptist or otherwise, say this?”

As Clarence’s despair grows, he stops attending church, part of his gradual untethering from his family and community. This quote captures his disillusionment with the Christian faith. These potentially helpful words no Baptist preacher could say are bitter contradictions of Christ’s teachings in the Gospel of Matthew. In the Beatitudes, Jesus says that “the meek” will “inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:6); but here they are “trampled on.” Jesus taught that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God (Matthew 19:24); but here he “forces his way through.” The fact that no preacher can say the words that would help Clarence adds to the theme of silence: Unspoken words contribute to guilt, resentment, and finally violence.

“‘Thou shalt not bear false witness,’ the Bible said—but why not, if the jury couldn’t tell the difference between the truth and pack of lies and neither could the judge? Dressed in black and wearing a veil as if she was in mourning for him, dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief, she fooled them all. The Bible also said, ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife,’ and he was ordered to pay them fifty dollars a month. That was their reward, for breaking the Ten Commandments.”

Clarence’s cynicism toward New Testament teachings in the prior quote is mirrored by the futility of Old Testament laws here. His sense of injustice erases his faith and sets him on the path to murder and suicide. The idiom “pack of lies” has a special meaning because of Maxwell’s earlier metaphor of a “deck of cards” (also called a “pack” of cards) from which the narrator draws one “lie” at a time to imagine the past. The lies about the past within the narrative are miniatures of the overarching lie about the past, which is memory itself.

“Whether they are part of home or home is part of them is not a question children are prepared to answer.”

Throughout the novel, houses and homes are associated with family and individual integrity. That association is made definitive here: Children’s identities are inseparable from their homes. Maxwell follows this quote with a catalog of Cletus’s dispossession, removing one piece of home at a time before concluding, “In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead” (113). Home is a child’s identity, and a home’s disappearance takes the child’s identity with it.

“When I dream about Lincoln it is always the way it was in my childhood. Or rather, I dream that it is that way—for the geography has been tampered with and is half real, half a rearrangement of my sleeping mind.”

Tributaries of dreams and memories flow into the ocean of an invented past. The geography of Lincoln has been “tampered with” as much by historical changes as by the narrator’s incomplete recollections. The autobiographical features of the novel come to the fore in the final chapter: Lincoln, Illinois, is the author’s real hometown, and the narrator’s role as a fabricator of the past matches Maxwell’s position in this metafictional text.

“(It is time to let go of all these people and yet I find it difficult. It almost seems that the witness cannot be excused until they are through testifying.)”

The parenthetical framing of this quote calls into question who is speaking: the narrator or Maxwell himself. Perhaps there is no difference at this point. The author can’t let go of the real people any more than his avatar can abandon the characters. The metaphor of witness testimony recalls the “lies” about Clarence in the courtroom, which points toward Maxwell’s thesis that “in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw” (27).