So Long, See You Tomorrow

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1980

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-9

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Family Instability and Its Effect on Children

Marriage and family instability define the early lives of children in the novel. All three central families experience major upheavals. The narrator’s experience of losing his mother shapes his early life and contributes to his sympathy for Cletus. The two boys meet daily in an unfinished house, a symbol of families in flux. The narrator is adapting to a new stepmother and a painful move from the childhood home he associates with his mother. Cletus has recently been moved to town by his mother, who is preparing to divorce his father. Both boys are living in temporary locations that are not their homes.

The narrator’s family, like his house, is under construction. The Smiths and Wilsons, by contrast, are falling apart. The families are locked in a crisis of marriage and infidelity. The fates of the children hinge on the actions of their parents, but the parents (other than Marie Wilson) never prioritize the well-being of their children. When Marie tells Lloyd she is moving out with their four daughters, he responds that the affair with Fern has made him happy for the first time in his life. In the Smith family, Clarence’s abuse and Fern’s affair with his best friend poison their household and turn the children into collateral damage. Clarence is so distraught after the divorce he can’t bring himself to utter a word to Cletus during the boy’s only visit. Lloyd, Cletus, and Fern are absorbed in emotional turmoil; their children fade into the background.

Cletus is highly attuned to the disruptions shaking the two families. He pieces together an understanding of adultery from glimpsed events and overheard conversations. He shares his father’s humiliation, evidenced by his blushing face at the barbershop. Despite the enormous impact the break-up has on him, Cletus is forbidden to express opinions about it. When he tries to give his father advice, he is met with immediate violence and threats.

The outcome of the infidelity—as Lloyd sensed from the beginning and Fern increasingly feared—is a catastrophe. Clarence’s violent revenge and suicide visit an unthinkable aftermath upon the combined eight children of the two families.

Memory and Fiction

The central idea of So Long, See You Tomorrow is that memory is a form of storytelling. This theme is both a part of the story and the method used to tell it. Maxwell suggests that memory constantly rewrites the past to accommodate literary elements like major and minor characters, point-of-view, plot points, linearity, climactic moments, and lessons learned. Because of memory’s essentially narrative nature, there is no simple or complete truth about the past—there are instead semi-fictional retellings. But this in no way dissuades the narrator (or Maxwell) from proceeding. On the contrary, the narrator uses the power of fiction to locate a lost friend who only exists in memory. He invents a past that atones for a signature failure through a feat of imagination, empathy, and speech.

The narrator calls attention to his inability to know the full truth. He compares his narrative to witness testimony based on the imagination of a crime. It wouldn’t hold up in court, but the narrator counters that “as it has been demonstrated over and over, the sworn testimony of the witness who was present is not trustworthy either” (56). Even eyewitness testimony is unreliable because memory is inherently selective and constructive.

Decades after the murder of Lloyd Wilson, the narrator researches the incident and discovers that his clear memories of the crime were riddled with inaccuracies. In his memory, Clarence caught Lloyd and Fern in bed together and shot them both. He had misremembered to fit a familiar explanatory format: the crime of passion. The narrator’s experience is a replica of Maxwell’s. His first attempt at writing nonfiction about the murder was based on memories later disproven by research. The superimposition of Maxwell onto the narrator further complicates notions of truth and fiction. Author and narrator embrace memory as a form of storytelling to imagine a fictional past where formerly powerless children are given a voice.

The narrator suggests that memory’s flaws are disorienting but potentially freeing. The narrator describes how his memories and dreams have coalesced in old age. Dreaming, like memory and imagination, transforms the past into a subjective unreality. He closes the novel by hopefully wondering if Cletus’s traumatic memories of the past became like dreams with the passage of time. The fictional quality of memory has gone from inspiring the story’s creation to freeing the characters within it.

Father-Son Communication

The oppressive weight of silence is a force of grief, transgression, and regret for the characters in the novel. The power of silence is learned from fathers and practiced by sons, engendering lifelong guilt essential to the book’s genesis.

Silence pervades the narrator’s household after the death of his mother. His father is obviously grieving as he paces the floor, but he never talks to his children about what he is feeling. Later in life, the father admits that he didn’t speak because he didn’t know what to say; the narrator wishes he had at least said that much. The narrator’s older brother, too, provides a model of silence. The boys share a room where they never discuss obvious traumas like their absent mother and the brother’s missing leg.

The narrator’s enduring interest in the murder is driven by a lifetime of regret over failing to speak to Cletus after the crime. The action of not speaking is a consequential deed with real-world outcomes. Silence is not just the opposite of speech; it is a powerful form of communication. The narrator wonders what messages may have been delivered to Cletus when he passed him in the corridor. As an old man, he is still longing to explain himself to his friend and undo the act of not acting. He explicitly identifies “making amends” as the purpose of this book.

The boys learned the lessons of silence from their fathers. When they pass without speaking in the corridor, they enact a ritual they observed all their lives, at home and in the community. Clarence and Lloyd are repeatedly depicted holding their tongues, sitting in silence, and ignoring questions. These actions eventually destroy their marriages and leave eight children fatherless. The most consequential moment of withholding occurs when, before the affair, Lloyd nearly tells Clarence that he is attracted to Fern. Mouthing the words under his breath, he knows he should warn Clarence not to trust him. If he has spoken, two deaths and unfathomable trauma could have been avoided.

The connection between silence and violence is again apparent when Cletus tries to advise his father about his mother’s personality and is struck in the face. Patriarchal silence is not only modeled but also enforced. Clarence passes Cletus in the corridor; but Cletus passes him, too. Both boys have inherited a legacy of silence.