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Chapter 64
Explanation and Analysis:
Demon Copperhead is a bildungsroman, or a coming of age story. Like the novel upon which it is loosely based, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, the novel follows its young protagonist from early childhood through to adulthood, from innocence and naivety to maturity. When Demon returns to his hometown in Lee County, Virginia, after receiving treatment for his addiction to drugs, he reflects upon his past and his growth:
The road from Murder Valley back to Lee County made me uneasy. Again, too many IEDs. This drive was where Angus and I had our only real fight, because she’d confessed to wanting to skip out on us all, to go to college, and I was counting up the hardships nailing me to the cross I’d dragged down this road: Here I got robbed by a truck-stop whore. Here I slept in a haystack. Shaking my mean little piggy bank of wrath. It set my teeth on edge, that memory.
As he drives through Lee County, Demon remembers several unpleasant events from his difficult childhood, including a fight with his foster-sister, Angus, and an incident in which he was robbed by a sex worker while hitchhiking to Tennessee to meet his maternal grandmother. Though he still feels angry when he thinks about how poorly he was treated throughout his childhood, these past events feel increasingly distant to Demon as he looks upon his hometown with a new perspective after being away for several years. He even returns to Devil’s Bathtub—a waterfall marked by numerous tragedies in Demon’s life—and feels that it no longer has any power over him. A coming of age story, Demon Copperfield follows its protagonist through the trials of his early life and his development into a mature young man.
