The Stone Boy
Childhood, brotherhood, family, grief, guilt, identity. Let's explore it all this week!
The Facts
Text: The Stone Boy Author: Gina Berriault
Genre: Modern, American lit Year: 1957
Available: Free Here
Content warning: Gun violence, grief, death of a child.
The Fiction
Short stories have such a small space to tell a story. While compelling style and interesting writing can mean a lot, more than in long form fiction the premise of a short story really matters in cementing its impact on the reader. This week's story blooms from its simple but powerful premise. The Stone Boy by Gina Berriault is full of beautiful descriptions of an American farm, but its the premise of the story that grabs the reader's attention. (spoilers below!)
The Stone Boy is about a nine year old farm-boy who accidently shoots his older brother. A horrifying story, not in the sense of ghost or monsters as we talked about in October, but horrifying in that real-life way of real-life tragedy. But the hook of the story is not simply that Arnold shoots his brother by accident, its what he does right after. Arnold accidently shoots his brother while the two are out in the fields picking peas, and after the gun fires and Arnold realizes his brother is dead instead of running home and getting his parents....he continues picking the peas and brings them home. Only then does he tell his parents Eugene is dead.
Arnold's strange reaction is a source of confusion both for the other characters in the story and for the reader. Why did he do that? The narrative unfolds with Arnold's father and Uncle taking him to the Sheriff. The Sheriff asks what happened and Arnold explains how the gun got caught in the fence wire the brother's were crawling through. The Sheriff understands and then asks the question everyone has been thinking: why didn't Arnold go straight home? The Sheriff asks if Arnold and Eugene got along, and if Arnold was friends with his brother. The narration makes it clear that Arnold did love his brother so we as readers know the explanation isn't so simple.
Arnold struggles to explain his choice to pick the peas to others and finally tells the Sherriff that he stayed in the fields because the sun was coming up and peas are picked best when still cool. The Sheriff explains to Arnold's Uncle and Father that that is a perfectly reasonable answer, the brother was already dead, what would running to the house do? No sense spoiling the peas. In the Sheriffs experience the reasonable one's are often the cruelest.
Arnold's father and Uncle take this in and the Sheriff sends them all home, as Arnold is nine and it was an accident, but he also implies he expect to see the boy again one day. The family has a silent dinner. After dinner other farmers and families from the area start visiting them to give their condolences now that the work day is done. Arnold wants to hide away but knows his absence would be more conspicuous. He fears the Sheriff's words that he is cruel and knows that the whole community has heard the story of him picking peas.
Arnold goes to bed admitting to himself that he hasn't cried nor does he feel grief--he just feels empty. He attempts to go to his mother's room to talk to her about his horror at the shooting but when he knocks on the door she sends him away. The next morning Arnold's sister refuses to pas him the milk jug but their father makes her. Arnold is happy his parents don't intend to ignore him for the rest of his life. He volunteers to spend the morning looking for a calf in the hills (away from the rest of the family). As Arnold leaves, his mother asks him what he wanted last night and Arnold answers that he didn't want anything from her. As he leaves the house his legs shake with the fear he feels at the truth of his answer--that he doesn't want anything.
The Feeling
Some stories give us answers and reveal to us the nature of their characters. Other's present us with the plot and an interesting character and leave it up to us figure out what to make of it all. Is Arnold some sort of burgeoning psychopath as the Sherriff proposes? Is he simply in some sort of shock? The story presents these questions but not a definitive answer.
There is definitely something strange in Arnold's choice and behavior, but grief is strange and people deal with it in different ways. Guilt just makes it more complicated. If we were told the story of Arnold from a distant third party narrator (for example it the way I retold it above) it might be easy for us to let him off the hook with that reasoning. That he is a young boy in shock who reacted strangely in his grief.
But The Stone Boy refuses to be that simple. Told in its third-person omniscient style we are given access to Arnold's thoughts through the narration. Arnold explicitly thinks about how he doesn't feel sad. He spends the story aware of how other characters are viewing him, and trying to manage their emotional response to his presence, but we never get much sense about how he feels--if he feels anything. There are moments, especially at the end, when he expresses something akin to fear or horror not necessarily at what he has done, but at the possibility that he doesn't feel anything about it at all. Arnold is wondering the same things as the other characters and as the reader: is he some kind of psychopath?
How the reader views Arnold will ultimately inform what the story means to them. If you read Arnold as simply a normal kid going through shock and grief then the story is about how parents and community can lead to kids internalizing negative and damaging facts about themselves. (Arnold begins to fear he is cruel and sociopathic only after other people around him start to worry about it). On the other hand if you see Arnold as some kind of burgeoning psychopath then this story is a character study with elements of horror about a boy killing his brother and not feeling much about it. The same events happen, but the story changes meaning so much depending on how Arnold is viewed by the reader, which is pretty cool storytelling.
Comentarios