Tinkers

Tinkers begins with George lying on his deathbed, and his imminent death at once sets the tone for the novel. George has come to terms with the fact that he is dying. In the last few hours of his life, his family gathers around him and begins mourning in earnest. George, who is often tucked away in dreams and hallucinations during these final moments, barely registers their grief but he understands that they are attempting to comfort him. However, George does not care about his physical comfort, since he knows this cannot change the outcome. He thinks that “physical comfort...[is] as meaningless to him now as it would have been to one of his clocks, […] its broken springs wound down or its lead weights lowered for the last, irreparable time” (194). George associates himself with an “irreparable” clock—he knows that death is moments away and that no amount of comfort and love can alter its course. George’s attitude of acceptance shows that death is inevitable and final. Since the novel begins with George dying, it also shows how the awareness of death shapes George’s understanding of his life, as he attempts to find meaning and human connection in the face of death.

This awareness of death is shared by Howard, whose seizures cause him to feel the weight of his mortality. Howard senses that his life—like his seizures—is out of his control and that he is always moving toward the inevitable end. A moment when this is especially obvious is when he unintentionally bites George’s hand when George tries to help Howard during one of his seizures. George is upset and runs away, and Howard hopes that his son makes it far and starts a new life; to Howard, life and happiness must exist far from his own struggles since he believes he is tainted by death and unhappiness. Soon after, as Howard takes in the natural world around him, his thoughts turn to death and mortality as he observes the effects winter has on the plants around him: “All of these bones, then, seemed to have been stained white to brown, and not the tough fibrous flower and seed-spilling green they actually once had been” (127). He describes the dead stalks of plants as “bones,” showing that he identifies with them, seeing them as reflections of his own body. The plants, like him, are no longer “tough” and “seed-spilling green,” reflecting Howard’s own exhaustion and powerlessness. The natural world highlights the inevitable progression of life—from vigor to death and decay—as a natural cycle that human beings are part of, as well.

George’s interest in clocks emphasizes that the passage of time is constant and relentless as the characters move toward old age and death. His awareness of his mortality becomes interconnected with the clocks he surrounds himself with. Early in the novel, he associates the beating of his own heart with the ticking of the clocks. One day, when a clock stops ticking, George “imagine[s] inside the case of that clock, dark and dry and hollow, […] [and] he [feels] the inside of his own chest and [has] a sudden panic that it, too, [has] wound down” (43-44). Though George is still young, he realizes that his heart will eventually wind down, and this awareness of his mortality sends him into a “sudden panic.” He understands that mortality is inescapable and out of his control. Since George works with clocks and surrounds himself with them, their constant ticking has become the background noise of his life. This is why he finds their sudden silence disruptive and unnerving, which foreshadows his own death as his heart, too, will wind down just as the clocks do.