Tinkers

Chapter 3 shifts even deeper into the past as it follows Howard through his own childhood and describes his struggles confronting the decline and disappearance of his own father. While Howard eventually undergoes a similar transition away from his family, his own father’s illness also has a severe impact on young Howard. As his father begins to decline, forget, and seemingly disappear, Howard realizes that his father will soon be dead. Even after his father is sent away by Howard’s mother, he remains in the house through memories. Howard feels his father’s presence in a visceral way, which demonstrates The Power of Memory. He recalls that he would feel his father’s presence through “some faint scent out of season, such as the snow melting into the wool of his winter coat, but on a blistering August noon” (144). Howard’s memories of father are so clear, as when he recalls “the snow melting into the wool of his winter coat,” that is seems like his father’s presence lingers on in the house. As in the instance of the smell of the winter coat on a hot summer day, memory, too, operates outside of time and space.

Howard also confronts Death, Mortality, and the Passage of Time as he watches his father’s decline. He struggles to witness his father’s illness and tries his best to ignore it and the shame he associates with it. He recalls that he was frightened by his father’s “thin, pale legs” and nakedness as he saw his mother dressing him (147); Howard is upset by the indignity of seeing his father naked, waiting to be dressed. He realizes that his father no longer retains any of his independence, and the sight of his thin legs proves to Howard that his father’s body is quickly deteriorating. Howard is even more upset by the fact that his mother chooses to dress him “in the parlor rather than their bedroom” since it was in the parlor that his father used to “console widows” when he worked as a preacher (147). Howard understands an intense contradiction in this moment, seeing his father so severely weakened in a place where he usually showed strength; his father used to be someone whom other, weaker people depended on. Now, he is the one who needs help, and Howard struggles to witness this transformation. He understands, too, that this change must be hard for his father as well. Howard debates “opening the shades and letting the raw, weak light pour down” on his father, but this seems “worse, as if the least my father could be granted was that he be allowed to fall apart in the dark” (147-48). Howard thinks that by allowing his father to deteriorate privately, without witnesses, he would be giving him some dignity in his suffering. It is painful to watch his father become someone different—weak, ill, and dependent—and Howard struggles with the realization that this is life’s end.

The philosophy of life and the meaning behind it that Howard ponders throughout the novel come together in Chapter 3 as he attempts to process his father’s decline and death. He tries to find his father in nature and sits in a pond all night, nearly freezing and passing out, which culminates in his first seizure. Following this, Howard comes to truly understand how precious life is. He describes the spark of life as “that tiny germ of heat allotted to each person,” and he realizes “how slight, how fragile it [is], how it almost [can] not even be properly called heat, as its amount [is] so small” (166). Howard himself nearly dies while searching for traces of his father in the natural world, and he experiences an acute awareness of his own mortality by getting so close to death. He believes that it is fairly easy to die, and he sees life as an improbable miracle. Howard’s new outlook links him with his own father’s ideas as a preacher. Howard’s father often spoke of the precious value of all living creatures, and Howard begins to understand this sentiment better, developing the theme of Family History and Generational Legacy. Though Howard’s father is dead, his ideas live on in his son, just as Howard’s passion for tinkering connects him with George, despite their estrangement.