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Allusions
Chapter 39
Explanation and Analysis—A Girl I Remember:
Chapter 39 interrupts Saul’s narrative sequence with a flashback. Just after he lashes out and loses his spot on the feeder team, Saul’s thoughts shift suddenly to Rebecca Wolf, a girl from St. Jerome’s:
There was a girl I remember from St. Jerome's. Her name was Rebecca Wolf and she arrived there with her younger sister. They were beautiful. When I saw them for the first time they were getting out of the car that had brought them to the school. I was raking grass, but I stopped what I was doing to watch them. Rebecca saw me looking and gave me a little smile.
The flashback is strikingly abrupt—it takes the reader from Saul’s fuming rage one moment to the hazy memories of more than a decade past. Its ending is also as tragic as it is surprising. What has the beginnings of a love story concludes in devastating fashion. In the course of a few pages, the “beautiful girl” turns from a secret crush to ghastly suicide victim. “I never saw the knife. Not until the song was over.” Rebecca Wolf kills herself, swiftly and stoically, bringing her deep griefs down with her.
The episode forms a brief yet haunting intermezzo that lingers over the novel. The subsequent chapter shifts back to the present as Saul returns to Fred Kelly’s, but the reader cannot shrug off the eeriness of Rebecca’s suicide. The flashback leaves an uncanny, uncomfortable reminder that anticipates the equally unexpected admission that Saul will make himself. Upon his return to St. Jerome’s, memories of Father Leboutilier’s sexual abuse come surfacing as he confronts the truth of his relationship. In a story where telling is remembering, Rebecca’s episode shows how the past can insert itself forcefully, unpredictably, and violently.
Related Themes:
