I have to say, on my first reading of "The Stone Boy," (was it only a week ago?) I did not think of Chekhov's gun, not right away. When Arnold plucked his rifle off the gun rack I thought of Murphy's Law. This is why I believed: I have seen over and over again how anything that can go wrong will. A nine-year-old with a rifle immediately seemed like bad news.
Another thing I noticed immediately was the tender beauty of the language. "The mountains behind the farm made the sun climb a long way to show itself." Lines like this brought me fully into the world of the story. I knew where I was, and with whom.
It is interesting that Arnold sleeps naked. (I didn't start doing that until I was fifteen!) Something about this makes him even more painfully vulnerable. I like that Gina started out with that.
It's also interesting--and telling--that in the beginning, Arnold seems wide awake, and Eugene is only semi-conscious.
Gina's attention to detail in the paragraph in which the gun goes off is stunning. Clambering through the fence. The sonic blow of the shot. Arnold lifting his face, to take the verbal abuse. Eugene falling, pitching forward. The ducks rising up, calling, the beat of their wings. I think this is another reason I did not question anything; I was part of the scene.
"It was a warmth on his back, like a large hand laid firmly there, that made him raise his head." This also felt perfectly real. "Arnold lay still as a fugitive, listening to the cows eating close by. If his parents never called him, he thought, he would stay up in the loft forever, out of the way. In the night he would sneak down for a drink of water from the faucet over the trough and for whatever food they left for him by the barn." Again, this feels exactly like the mind of a nine-year-old boy. 'I will accept my punishment. I am no longer fit to live among my people. I will stay out of their way. I will only eat if they leave me their scraps.'
The scene where Arnold tries to speak to his mother is at least as heart-wrenching as any of the others, perhaps more so. Gina's gift is that everyone in the story does exactly what they can do, but it is not enough. "He had expected her to tell him to come in and allow him to dig his head into her blankets and tell her about the terror he had felt when he had knelt beside his brother." This astonishing flashback to what he had felt when he realized Eugie had died--had felt but could not know, or process, at the time. (I think, many years ago, it took me weeks, if not months, to know not just in my mind but in my body, in all of my being, that my lover was truly, fatally, completely dead, and not coming back.) It's catching up with him now, yet no one can see it. And he realizes his nakedness, and so do we. And he must flee the light of his father's lantern.
"Then he went out the door and down the back steps, frightened by his answer." I am frightened by it, too. All I can see is a string of years and decades, flattened out, and empty, unless there is a bird or willow or a body or a body of water that can save him, or a memory of his brother. A line of music, or a book. But I believe that more than one person who has read this story may have been saved by it; or might have been able through forgiveness or understanding to save someone else.
I was going to write my own comment, David, but yours touched on something important that happened to me as well. One hook for me was the sheer beauty and prowess of her writing. She laces these pictoral gems within the apparent simplicity of her style. I was entranced by it. I also had some life experience that made it easy to suspend my disbelief. I was walking behind a friend down the furrows of a date orchard. We were returning from hunting during an era when we could walk down our streets and into the open desert with our shotguns on our shoulders. Suddenly his weapon, which was angled back my way, went off. He accidentally pulled the trigger as he stumbled over a dirt clod. We were teens. We were irresponsible and likely high. He forgot to unload his gun and his finger was on the trigger. It could have been disasterous. It happened out of the blue. But the shot went into the trees over my head. So, yeah, that was where I went in that moment. An experience I hadn't thought of in years came rushing up out of my body and joined the tragedy playing out on the page. For me, that passage had remarkable heft in its stark suddenness.
Thank you for that story, Michael. It does seem that much of the time who lives and who dies is simply the luck of the draw—or fate, whatever that mysterious force is.
David I enjoyed reading your thoughts. It's interesting you noted the line "The mountains behind the farm made the sun climb a long way to show itself." I love the language here too. I think it does a great job of showing us how everything Arnold sees is about something/someone having power over something/someone else -it's even in the way he thinks of the sun coming up. That word 'made' is so subtly placed and rings of a child's voice. I've mentioned a in a few other posts that I feel Arnold is really trying to understand his place as the youngest in a family/community.
I too liked that Gina started with noting the nakedness, and I see it a tiny warning sign of negligence (where are those PJs or underwear), who tucks him in (aged nine) and checks he's cozy?. Maybe he wants to be like Eugene, we didn't get to know if Eugene was naked, so I doubt it is that. Also, he doesn't put on underwear beneath his overalls. Is that just demonstrating his practical nature/just being reasonable - like the importance of collecting peas when they're cold?
I love the attention to the detail of getting the boys and the tub through the wire (at different levels -- because Arnold notices that, because he's smaller) I love how our focus is on that so it's the moment we are least expecting the gun to go off, even if we anticipate it will.
Yes to the hand on the back, an incredible line, especially in the light that it never happens. No-one offers him any comfort. No-one suspects he might be in shock. Most mothers and fathers would still want to hug their children after an incident, despite the child's reaction. The fact that the mother tells him to go away from the door, is the most devastating scene, but we have been led to expect it. The sister skips behind worried she might be forgotten, and that's a second mention about worrying about neglect.
I think Arnold retreats to animals and nature as a place to fit in, (staying the barn, eating scraps (like chickens) or where being an animal will get his father's attention or being an animal is easier to do (even when he tries to pounce on Eugene, that has a lion cub feel to it). All that Gina tells us about the world around them in nature, is how Arnold sees it, I think.
It's a incredible story, without a wasted word, with incredible structure, and with layering of meaning at every sentence said and unsaid.
Wow, Marissa. Thank you for taking me even deeper into it! With some of this I merely felt the beauty of the line but missed the significance of the way it rippled out into the world of the story.
I just received my copy of Women In Their Beds. I am so happy to have it.
I know what you mean, Marissa. For me, it’s probably more of a comfort because I feel - with proof from over a half century of reading - that in the hardest times, the knowledge that there is reading to be done gives me comfort and the strength to go on.
I agree with you and David Snider that the end of the story is the end of Arnold as we know him. But I felt his mother and father made two separate gestures that suggested they were "recognizing" him again. One is when the father puts the milk pitcher in front of A and the other is when his mother ask him "humbly" what he wanted when he knocked at her door. The fact that she has paused to even ask him is telling. So I took that to mean that maybe they had begun to feel his pain, even if only a little. And that Arnold dies - is turned to stone - because he is ashamed / aghast to still be among the living, while his brother lies dead. So in a sense, the community and family don't deal the final blow. Arnold does. Arnold ends up being the cruelest of them all - to himself.
Thank you, Lisa, that is so eye-opening. Isn’t that the way it always goes? People are cruel to us, then we incorporate the cruelty, and take the reins.
Thank you, Marilyn, I felt that, too. To be unseen, unfelt and unknown is another way to die. I love that this story has a way of stirring the stew of the soul and bringing up something new to think and feel about with every fresh reading. I look forward to reading more work by this writer.
That's all I can see too, and what the story implies for me. Of course it's a story, rather than a person, who could possibly have his life turned around as so many of us have experienced.
Hi Mary, thank you. It was a rough one, to be sure. But I was lucky to know her, and it has been quite a journey since then, the grace of trying out so many ways to heal.
In college, I took a class called “Film and Literature” which met weekly. On odd weeks, we watched a film adapted from a text source (novel, story, letter, poem, essay); on even weeks, we’d invite a guest speaker to talk about her field in a way she thought would be of value/interest to people interested in film translation. One of the guest speaker weeks was — by itself — worth all four years of tuition.
Our speaker was a professor in the History of Art department who specialized in 19th-century French art. He strode onto the stage and, without introduction, projected a slide of two black charcoal smudges, one on top of the other snowman-style, against a pure white background. No scenery or detail; no lighting; just the two round smudges.
After a minute of silence, he asked, “What is this a picture of?” Silence. None of us wanted to make a fool of ourselves.
“Alright…let me make it easier. Is this a person, place, or thing?” After some hemming and hawing, we voted that it was probably a person.
“What kind of person?” Long silence. “What gender…male or female?” [this was back in 1970, when these were the only options publicly acknowledged]
Lots of discussion, but a plurality of us agreed the image was of a female.
“How old is she?” Cries of plaintive outrage from us: all we had to work with were two featureless smudges of black charcoal! How could he expect us to know the figure’s age?
“Well…is this an infant? A teenage girl? A middle aged woman? An elderly woman?” Further discussion. The figure was standing, so not an infant. She had considerably more weight below than above…so older. The discussion proceeded, and, eventually we settled on a woman in late middle age at least.
“Okay. What kind of work does she do? Is she accustomed to hard work with her hands, or does she have a desk job?” “What time of day is it…is she freshly awoken…or exhausted at the end of day?” “Is she walking uphill or down?”
He carried on thus for 58 of minutes of our hour. By then, we’d agreed the picture was of a woman in her late 60’s or early 70’s, she did hard labor of some sort; it was the end of the day, and she was exhausted. Simply by asking us question after question, he dragged her life story out of us.
Finally, our guest speaker told us, “This is a charcoal sketch by the French artist, George Seurat. You’ll all be greatly pleased to know that he called this, ‘The Washerwoman.’ So you all were on the right track. Now, you may ask, why did I put you through this interrogation? You asked me to talk about something in my field that would be of value or interest to people adapting films from text originals. The key point about this exercise for me is that YOU ALREADY HAD ALL THE INFORMATION I DRAGGED OUT OF YOU before I asked, even if you didn’t have fully conscious access to it. Seurat packed all that information into just these two nearly abstract charcoal smudges, and you REGISTERED that information in a flash. Why is that important to you as would-be filmmakers? Because when your audience watches one of your films, they’ll also be registering information and drawing conclusions as quickly as you did, drawing on every detail in the film. So, if you want to have any INTENTIONAL influence on what your audience experiences as they watch, you need to be completely aware of — and to control — what’s present in every part of every frame.”
And with that, he took down his slide and walked off.
Now, why did I tell you all this?
First, I’d like to say, with more than a little awe, how much everyone’s comments here justify that long-ago guest speaker’s (and Seurat’s) faith that members of the audience (readers/viewers) absorb every detail, even without consciously having realized it.
Second (this may be a little jarring), while I love this story — am quite blown away by its power — I find myself persistently troubled by one detail in the geography of the gun’s firing (and I hope someone can clear it up for me):
Eugie has already gone under the fence ahead of Arnold. Now Arnold is struggling through as well. He’s most of the way under. If the trigger catches on the fence, he must be holding the gun by its muzzle end, and the gun must be pointed forward in order to hit Eugie. But if Arnold is mostly through the fence himself and tugging on the gun when it snags, how could pressure on the back of the trigger cause it to fire? Is there something somehow physically wrong about the scene as described? or am I merely mis-seeing the scene?
I’m feeling a bit blasphemous and ashamed of myself to be asking such a petty question (against the majesty and understated power of everything else in the story). But the question troubled me even in my first reading, and I’ve been struggling with it ever since.
OK, you're all overthinking here, I say, but I'm also over-posting now, so whatever... let's chat. For a reader, it's about believability. You're a tough crowd, you who are familiar with the handling of rifles. We're so hard on this writer because we're analyzing what works for us and what doesn't. Not everyone is sold on the details, clearly, but most are. Most are sold. Again: most are sold on what she has written here, as am I. I'm taking away that message because that is where a writer's power resides. It's the one issue that matters to writers wanting to influence readers. (I say it all the time to my kids: the people who tell the stories that are believed are the most powerful people in the world and across time.) Nonetheless, you asked so I'll offer an answer regarding the gun logistics since no one else has responded so far, and this piece invites us to be focused on guns, gun safety, and potentially the politial issues surrounding all that... Arnold's rifle is an old lever-action rifle (no safety switch) that functions much like the BB guns the kids in my generation and region grew up with. BBs were always gonna put someone's "eye out" but a .22 can do damage. A .22 bullet in the right place will kill. It's a starter gun for hunter kids. That it was a .22 Arnold pulled off the kitchen wall told me some things I believed. That is was old and without a safety in the hands of a 9yo, well I knew what was coming and that it wasn't ducks. That the setup was so clean, I believed the unfolding. The narrow fence pass-through and the lax atmosphere, a snag... In my mind, inside of Arnold, I'd already loaded and levered the gun back in the kitchen because I'm a kid trying to be a grown-up, not someone fresh out of gun safety class. I'd carried it behind my big brother through the narrow opening in the barbed-wire fence (that's what it was in my mind because most modern wire fences are crossed, and anything only horizontal is electric now if not still barbed), and the trigger inside the lever is what caught on the (barbed) wire. Jerking it forward, pulled the trigger back... I believed from inside of Arnold. All of it. The light rifle goes off with a low bang, more than the pop of a BB, enough to scare ducks, enough to kill if it hits in the right place. That place we were told to look on the second page (239).
Bruce & Mikhaeyla, these are both really good points that I hope others will attend to. The writer had a purpose, but this gun handling conduct isn't standard operating procedure for people who are familiar with gun culture for the story's era (or any era, really). To imply that it is gets into the influence of story, and that is what is important for us to grasp as writers. This is a story about the psychology of a type of culture and I saw generational trauma in it, myself. I think it's also about poverty, neglect, larger socioeconomic issues, and a lot of stuff besides guns. It's whatever lands on us and moves us, but the writer had motives for it. Don't we all? Is that just me? What were they, her motives? Do we see them? Was she successful?
(Having written and deleted a really long response) I think it's enough to say that a writer creates a story with certain intentions - and these intentions can be intuited by how they craft the story (what they focus on, how they order information, how they create contrast, how the story escalates and is resolved) - but that, despite these intentions, they can't maintain full control on what meaning is taken from a story. As you say - different things land on and move different people - we all come to stories from different starting points (our own interests, biases, motivations, hang-ups), and these will influence whether we see the signposts created by the author, whether we miss them, or whether we misread them. What can we take from that as writers? 1. Your story ceases to be your story as soon as you publish it, and 2. The more subtle your are in your treatment, the more you invite the reader to fill the gaps/sharpen the image (which is vulnerable to all kinds of divergent views and interpretations). Not necessarily a bad thing - it's like what George says about Chekhov: his stories create in the reader a question of whether something is this or that / good or bad, and Chekhov answers 'yes'. Maybe great stories are there to *move* us, not *mould* us?
Q. You’ve said, “Between the lines of every story, readers write their own lines, shaping up the story as a collaborative effort.” As the writer are you concerned about controlling or directing the reader’s lines, with the question of a “correct” interpretation?
A. Of course the writer wishes to compel and persuade and entice and guide the reader to a comprehension of the story, but there’s no such thing as a “correct” interpretation of a piece of fiction. That’s demanding a scientific precision of the writer. Each reader’s interpretation originates in his or her life’s experiences, in feelings and emotions of intensely personal history. You get more from what you read as you grow older, and your choices change, and, wiser, you bring more to that collaborative effort.
Traci- I think that is a really insightful look into this story. For me, I wondered: what’s more dangerous, a boy with a small gun or a mother who turns her back on her terrified, guilt-ridden son? And then there’s the rest of the adults with their stoic, distant review of the tragedy. I think this is a story about a failure of family and community. It was stacked against Arnold from the start. He was bound to over reach in one way or another, seeking acknowledgement and approval. The gun just happened to be the tool that day.
Kurt, I appreciate your comments. I was struck, too, by the adult's stoicism. That raised the biggest internal question in my: "Where are these people coming from? What is this culture?" The mother evidenced her grief by the wail Arnold heard as his family returned from the site of the shooting. And then she closed her heart to Arnold. As unsympathetic as this was, I found that I was able to entertain it as one of a number of possible grief and shock reactions. She blamed Arnold, who was the most proximal human cause. I was able to extend some compassion to her, and hoped that it would turn out to be temporary. But I was horrified for Arnold--how that shunning must have cut into his fragile psyche. It could have really "sealed the deal" for me to project a horribly scarred and stunted development for Arnold and his future. Finally, even the father, I was able to hold in some compassion. In the immediate shock of a child's death, and the tragically messed up way that it happened, almost anything goes. This, unfortunately, comes at the cost of personal experience. It is another way that this story was able to hook me into its believability. I held the whole family and close community in compassion. This is an event that changes the trajectory of many interconnected lives, for good or ill. It exceeds the ability to cope in any of the unrealistic ways we heap upon it, with our mandates for forgiveness and letting go. Society acts as if a great act of grace were an obligation. We do move on, if we survive, but with a giant hole clean through us, which will never close. These expectations and the trite advice and aphorisms that come with them can only serve to make us feel more alone. Yet even the perpetrators of these things are in need of compassion, for they are only trying to comfort themselves from the close touch of death in a death phobic culture.
Traci, thanks for this perfect, 100%, description of how the gun fired.
The tiny quibble I'd have is with Arnold chambering a round in the kitchen. There weren't gun safety classes in the '50s (that I was aware of), but I believe most kids had drilled into them that you don't chamber a round before you intend to shoot. So that was a mini-moment for suspension of disbelief for me... not a problem at all.
I think the omission of the chambering was a stylistic choice (rather than logical choice) - if Berriault had included that detail in the story, it would have ruined her sleight of hand; if she'd included it earlier (in the kitchen), there would be no way we would have been distracted or put at ease by the trip to the lake, and if she had mentioned it on the way to the lake, she would have been telegraphing what was about to happen. By leaving it out, she allows us to infer (in retrospect) that it happened somewhere along the way. And it works, because the shooting isn't really the point of the story, what comes next is; so that if some details are vague around the edges, it's the details that don't matter.
I agree, Mikhaeyla. It might have been an intentional omission. Specifically mentioning putting a bullet in the chamber would have dissolved almost any ambiguity I had about whether there was going to be an accident involving the gun. It would have worked like a blunt instrument. Nothing else I read in this piece worked that way. I still had some doubt. I still wanted to hope this was a warm, boyhood tale about a little brothers worship of his elder. Arnold could have chambered the bullet when he saw the ducks on the lake, before he ducked to step through the fence. That's when I would have done it as hunting boy. What surprised me is that he didn't put the gun down or lean it on a post before he stepped over. But he was trying to show his smooth competence, what he imagined would be his grownup ability to do such a thing without undue attention--step through in one, graceful motion and be ready to fire. That is what my brain registered as it was happening. That is how I worked when I was a boy--always fretting about making a good impression on the elders, of appearing worthy to be accepted into the brotherhood.
Michael, your point about Arnold trying to project a confidence and skill he didn't quite have yet - "trying to show his smooth competence, what he imagined would be his grownup ability to do such a thing without undue attention" - that hit so true to me. He idolises his brother, his brother has just offered to do the dirty work of getting the duck if he shoots it (because he sees Arnold as puny and likely to drown if he attempts it), and Arnold - who wants the respect of a brother who has just narrowed his eyes to 'slits of mocking blue' - wants to seem as smooth and competent as his beloved Eugie. Poor kid - this new revelation just makes my heart break louder for him...
I wondered about that too but on page 268, top of page, end of paragraph, Berriault writes, Then he sad down on the stool and began to load his gun. It's a good question to ponder as when the gun goes off and Arnold reacts the way he does. It's here, when we ask ourselves as George says in the post, An Incident, Part Two, Dynamism: are we at one with him, do we trust him? We circle back in the narrative for clues to help make that assessment.
Thank you for this. I have a sculptor friend who draws with only a piece of charcoal in his hand. He says he wants as much direct contact as possible between his hand and the paper. 'To see the hand in the line. Everything on the paper is in the line'.
I don't think the fence wire caught on the trigger. I think it caught on, or just bumped, the hammer. I was also curious about the mechanics of this and went into it a little in an earlier post (https://georgesaunders.substack.com/p/the-stone-boy-2/comment/5142271?utm_source=url). I don't know if I'm right, but I can at least picture it more easily now.
Thanks, Alex…your earlier post did it for me. I came into the conversation late and so had missed a lot of earlier discussion of the gun. Wish I’d seen your comments earlier…would have saved me a lot of fruitless pondering.
You’ve taken he scenic route in, but yes, I’m troubled by this too, because I don’t fully SEE it; in fact there are story milliseconds I’ve papered over there, and I’ve been in a rush to forgive based the strength of the rest of the story and the forward momentum of those moments, and whether it’s all that important, I’m not sure, but there’s a residual clot—or smudge—that has lingered. Is it possible this is a flaw left in place, or simply a flaw? Is it a strategy used to further push us off balance? Because it still troubles me, however slightly, I have to wonder.
I wondered if the reason we can't work it out as we are in Arnold's head. With him as he is looking at the ground (?), his mind focused forward to the ducks, listening to E talk about going in to get the duck if A shoots one. The gun snaring on the fence registers only as resistance, weight in his hand, A pulls at it without looking. He knows it's gone off by sound, not by sight, but doesn't even know in what direction the shot is fired. He waits to be yelled at, still not really looking. Until E doesn't yell at him, and then he realises something is wrong. Like him, we are left surprised, shocked, confused... my mind accepts A's POV- I only know what he knows, thinks, sees, hears. Guns aren't common where I live, and I know little about them, but I accept A's confusion as someone who didn't see what happened and can only guess.
Emma, having read several posts now about how the firing of the gun actually occurred, your post has resonated with me the most. We are inside A's head and he is not fully focused on the gun, therefore we are not focussed on it either, Arnold is trying to follow Eugie deftly through the fence, and on living up to his brother's "almost a man-ness."
This thread has been quite an education! As someone who doesn't know guns at all, nor the one in the story, the mechanism question didn't occur to me. It has helped me understand as per comments above, that a writer will convince some people with the way they handle an object, the description of it and how it is used, how much detail they add; and they will not convince others. A question of life experience?
A great lesson in any case: as a writer you will not please everyone.
I also imagined the gun's barrel pointing backwards, in the direction from which they came. I had to bend my mind a bit to imagine Arnold maneuvering it the other way through the fence, with the barrel pointing towards his brother. It does make a difference in the mind's eye. Still, when the air is "rocked by the sound of the shot," I got what happened, as I'm sure you did.
Thanks for posting this story about your class. Talk about seeing the whole world in "a grain of sand"...Wow. I think your four years of tuition just paid dividends for me too. I might owe you money...And as for the gun, though as Traci points out this might be getting off the real point, an old lever action .22 has a hammer exposed at the back. Pulling it and releasing it has the same effect as pulling the trigger. It sticks out and is easy to snag on something like a fence wire. If we wanted to get more psychological and metaphorical here...it's a small, powerful, vulnerable lever - not unlike the longing that exists in Arnold's heart.....
This post about the art professor was so wonderful to read, thank you. Resonates with so many things I've heard from both spiritual teachers (It's all inside you already) to writings like "Blink" which state that humans make up their mind/know in the first 8 seconds of meeting someone or thing whether it is true or false, for a lack of better words in this moment - thinking without thinking, knowing without knowing.
Yeah, I was troubled by that too--wait, where were both of them and how did a fence trigger the shot? Upon a second reading, I wasn't sure Eugie was standing up yet and as for the trigger, hammer, lever--I just accepted that it happened and moved on. In the sheriff's office, there was uncertainty about what triggered it to go off and that eased my mind--they weren't sure. It was a freak accident.
Thank you, your story about the guest speaker in 1970 and Seurat is mind-expanding. One of my thoughts is as a writer to pay full attention to the right details, not too many, and not too few: the proper proportion, with which a vast variety of readers can engage so that the story will live and grow and ask its necessary questions within the minds of most of them.
I agree that paying attention to everything (without distinction) would be a mistake. A good part of my career was devoted to researching, writing, and producing scrupulously realistic re-enactments of actual events in the workplace as the basis for assorted training programs. While my films were faithful er-enactments of things that actually happened, they were NOT (and could not be) mere recordings of the actual events. Instead, I aimed to make them intelligent paraphrases of the original designed to throw salient elements of drama and key applications of effective interpersonal skill — or opportunities for such applications — into relief.
I can't remember if it was a Pixar guy, but some showrunner/director said that one of the tricks for involving an audience is to give them everything they need to put two and two together, but not spoonfeed them the answer. Let them find that on their own and they will appreciate it more. This is actually best shown in Agatha Cristie's works - she always puts the clues right out in front of you, but you don't understand them until she shows you how they fit together.
As to believability, the purpose of a story is to hypotize you, draw you in. The moment your conscious mind starts going "wait a minute..." then you're out of the story. That's why detail and motivation are so important. You have to believe someone would do whatever they're doing, and detail shows they can do it. That's one of the problems I had with Stone Boy - to me it's not a story, but the recounting of an incident, and the two are not necessarily the same. Story, to me, would carry though to tell the effect this had on the characters and how it changed them. A lot of modern short story writers seem to dread actually finishing a story instead of just stopping. I feel cheated as a reader, and I think it's actually a little insulting to the characters since it leaves them hanging in limbo. My characters would scream bloody murder at me if I did that to them.
Although I loved the writing in this story, my "wait a minute" moment was in having to believe a 9 year old would respond to accidentally shooting his brother by calmly going to pick peas rather running back to his parents crying and screaming. Sure, denial can be very powerful, but this powerful? For a 9 year old? It didn't work for me, so for the rest of the story this was looming large. Not the way the shooting happened but the response to it. It felt contrived.
Hi John. My reaction to Arnold going to pick peas was that he knew he’d done wrong and he was going to get into trouble so if he picked the peas while they were cold that would be one less thing to get into trouble over. The enormity of what he’d done hadn’t sunk in then, but living in an agricultural area, he knew that it was essential that the crops were picked and preserved at the right time of day to see the family through the year. Perhaps his nine year old brain thought that by picking the peas he was helping to preserve his family, even if he couldn’t save his brother? Just a thought…
Thanks for your thoughts Alison. Maybe some kids could compartmentalize that way, but I can't imagine too many. I hope not too many anyway. I find it chilling that any 9 year old could watch his brothers blood drain out of the back of his head and then calmly go pick peas for an hour. That is more serious denial than I would think possible. Run away and hide out of shock and fear maybe, but not pick peas. Oh well, I'm the only one that seemed to bother or surprise, so it's probably just me.
I think it's interesting to follow the duck's being out of season and how that imbues the story with a sense of transgression. The brother warns him but apparently doesn't really care. It hangs over the walk down to the pond. It adds drama to the walk as they are careful not only to avoid disturbing the ducks but also not to be seen doing it. Slipping under the fence is a trespass of some kind. Maybe it's their own fence but it's a demarcation. There's a crime on the other side of this wire. It goes from something that seems simply naughty that any adult would simply admonish against on its onw. But duck hunting out of season is the most direct crime the adults discuss. They never say "murder" but they do judge him for the petty crime. It's all part of them framing him as a bad seed. The sheriff will see him later, surely.
This is interesting-- and then the moment where Arnold realizes he is naked and runs back to his room is not just the loss of innocence/end of childhood, but also his realization that he is, in fact, the bad seed they all treat him as.
True! And that moment brought to mind the Garden of Eden. Arnold has eaten of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil and discovered his nakedness and shame.
I thought of this as well, particularly given the matching initials of Arnold and Eugie with Adam and Eve, which I imagine was intentional, maybe just for this purpose.
I agree Kevin, in terms of how it imbues the story with a sense of transgression. It also helps to set up a misdirection which makes the moment the brother is shot all the more shocking. We, the reader, have our gaze fixed on the ducks in the distance (perhaps having misgivings about hunting out of season) and then the gun goes off.
I love the repetition of the duck shooting not being in season too. I get the sense it has three purposes 1)to show Arnold up for not knowing (as Arnold is used to being belittled) 2) to keep the gun in play all the time 3) to reenforce the need for rules in their community. The sheriff had an opinion there didn't he, he couldn't hold that in. "That's bad". The father is surprised when the sheriff doesn't want to keep Arnold - it seems not least because of the shooting season issue. I would have imaged a father, even if my son had behaved emotionally subdued to be grateful and relieved, not questioning, at this point.
1) I didn’t get a chance to respond to the last post; I read most of the comments and appreciated the insights. Thank you.
2) “How does Gina Berriault make us believe in the accident on which ‘The Stone Boy’ depends?” Had I read this story when I was younger (than now!), I might have missed the “how” of that which unfolds and maybe not bought into it (or refused to). Because when we are young we refuse to accept/ understand that while we are the “master of our fate”, there is so much we can’t control. Ever. Life is uncertain and it happens. It all happens. And we create illusions of control and call it living.
But more to the how: we as readers know life happens. And continues. And people think what they think about what’s happened. And they think what they think about what and how we were part of that which happens.
In terms of the how RE craft: in her own words in an interview she states, “And when you take the reader as your equal, your work isn’t affected or false. You establish that collaboration, that shared intuitiveness.”
I think that’s how she does it. She is counting on the reader to intuitively know accidents happen. And we are as surprised as we would be in real life. We can’t quite accept what’s happened and yet it happened!
Thank you for posting the link to this interview. When she says, “Between the lines of every story, readers write their own lines, shaping up the story as a collaborative effort", that was very much the experience I had with her story.
Also, loved that she shared this - "...I destroy much of what I write or I can’t work out what I want to say and I put the piece aside. The longing to write and the writing never cease.... And there’s the disbelief, so often at my elbow as I write, that I can write at all." This, this, from the writer of The Stone Boy!
Annie, thank you so much for this link to the interview with Gina Berriault...it is amazing...she knew what it was to be poor...and her description of the relationship between reader and author is wonderful and true.
but after reading that interview (I am sure there are other essays and interviews), I can’t help wondering: would she be allowed to be published today? and if her lack of being mainstream (as the interviewer asserts, she should be even better appreciated) is…sort of…intentional?
…the publishing industry went from championing to silencing voices outside establishments…
I don't think her lack of being mainstream was intentional. She taught herself how to write creatively and that was a very tough go. In that regard, she was an "outsider artist" but she did eventually get lots of recognition. In the maritime world, someone who starts on deck in the lowliest job and works their way up to be captain/master mariner is said to have "come up through the haws'pipe." A hawser being the heavy line that ships are tied up with. In effect, they've clawed their way up through an narrow and sometimes nasty path to a post of respect. I think Gina definitely came up through the haws'pipe in the literary world. Robert Stone was like that. His collection of stories "Bear and his Daughter" is excellent. I believe he spent many years as a smuggler in the Caribbean.
As far as the publishing goes, I don't think they necessarily silence voices outside the establishment...I just think they're not willing to take the risks anymore that they used to take.
Another thanks for the link to the interview, Annie. When I first read The Stone Boy I had a deep need to hear Berriault's voice, I guess to know her as a person as well as a writer. The interview fills in more of who she is for me. Such a remarkable woman.
Oof. This story is so quiet and devastating and beautiful. Biblical is certainly the word. I loved it. I hated it. The writing is on another level.
But I wanted to comment from a non-writing angle. So much of my work over the last five years has dealt with child sexual abuse. Its devastation is always twofold: the incident itself and reaction of the community afterwards. Because a child doesn't respond to trauma in a way that adults think they're "supposed to," they're often not believed. Their lack of emotion or recall makes adults think they're making it up. I've watched entire communities turn on child abuse survivors. I've watched those children believe, as Arnold does, other people's assessment of themselves.
All of this is to say that Gina Berriault's story so accurately and devastatingly depicts this trauma cycle that I couldn't read it without my heart in my throat.
Loved your comment and your description of the story. It mirrors very much how I felt. I feel that tension of loving it and hating it at the same time.
Thank you, Rachel. I suppose every child reacts to trauma in their own unique way. Shutting down is probably quite common. As a child, as an adult. And I think especially when a child feels betrayed by adults; or, by life.
Since reading this post, I realise I may have had a different and personal reading of the Stone Boy. I read some cruelty in Arnold's emotionally deprived life and that that is a factor in his reaction after the accident. i.e. the shooting tests a behavioural strategy he's learned and applies under extreme stress. I enjoyed the story, and it moved me.
To me the story questions the role of emotion when faced with the business of survival. I have known people, and have been known myself, to bury emotions by being practical. I have seen that this kind of behaviour can be misread as uncaring. I recognise that I work hard to interpret people’s feelings towards me, and I am guilty of projecting my esteem of myself into their estimation of me. The story made me value clear emotional expression and made me want to aim to try to express more positive emotion as an act of kindness. I didn't see much kindness (other than Eugene's) towards Arnold. It is a moral artefact because it presents evidence that if we withhold emotion, those around us are confused and may be likely to do so towards us too.
I read that the story subtly and repeatedly makes important points on how to view power when you are nine and from a farming family and the importance of being practical/reasonable to be powerful (in the world Arnold lives in), and what it means to be normal, and how without the emotional cues something can be labelled or misread because we have a tendency to project an emotional response, in the absence of understanding.
From the first paragraph, I immediately felt concern for Arnold. I had a suspicion of negligence which became compounded as the story progresses. The writer starts with tiny details on the first page and ramps the level of concern with a Chekov’s gun at the top of page two. From the fact that the poor kids doesn't wear PJs or underwear (okay, that might be personal choice) to the fact he is nine and has his own rifle. I have the sense Arnold wants to be like/equal to Eugene, and to be a good son in the eyes of his father, and that's what drives him but it's also what confuses him.
I immediately felt the story wanted us to see how it might be for a boy to learn where he fits into the family, what power he has now, and the power others have over him, when he might be able to grow or gain further power. He know's size, knowledge, age, maleness, attitude to work, come into it, but he hasn't fully grasped that acceptance/compliance of norms (crying like a baby following trauma) and rules (shooting in duck season) are as important as they are.
I think the story establishes a norm, where a lack of human emotional modelling (he seems to fear being told off or ridiculed) and this encourages Arnold to find an affinity with nature/animalism. He retreats to nature to feel safe, and looks to nature for answers on how to behave. He has been brought up to believe that it's good to be practical for survival, and that makes a person powerful, resilient, strong.
Arnold spends a lot of energy seeking and projecting meaning in people’s bodies, words, expressions, responses, but no-one around him is particularly emotional, and yet they accuse him of being a stone boy. Though Eugene was kind, he could also be belittling, and his father though just seems pretty emotionless, (the milk pitcher moment) and his mother and sister demonstrate that they can show unkindess towards him: to deny comfort and an opportunity to be forgiven, to deny sustenance (milk pitcher).
Though Arnold is not not outwardly emotional, which absolutely is compounded by shock, I have the sense that it's also a learned suppression similar to that which he sees around him. I carefully looked at everyone's reactions to him, and they are all stoney. But we know Arnold experiences love for Eugie, loneliness, a low sense of worth, a sense of duty, confusion, envy, fear, shame, rejection, and relief, he just doesn’t know how to demonstrate those feelings, because no-one around him tends to show one’s feelings.
I seemed to keep finding symbols in the story that I felt got cleverly replayed:
The sun: power
The peas: survival
The willows: a place of safety
The pale sky (emotionless)
Sloping field: the struggle at home
Being on one’s knees: weakened power
The mountains: obstacle to overcome
The rocker: A place of hopeful homely comfort.
Nakedness: Uncomplicated by ‘norms’
I thought it was so interesting that Arnold (for all the accusations of being emotionally cold) is a keen observer of the importance of people’s body language, the position of their eyes, their height/standing in relation to one another. He is in a family which isn't demonstratively loving and this had me totally consumed. Who do we become when we are not sure we are loved? We try to be more of something, more grown up, more practical, more quiet, more like a cow in a shed, or more of what we think others might want from us.
The first mention of Arnold’s parents stuck out to me: “He got up from the floor and went down the stairs, the laughter continuing, like hiccups, against his will. But when he opened the staircase door and entered the parlor, he hunched up his shoulders and was quiet because his parents slept in the bedroom downstairs.” He’s afraid of waking them.
Wow! Marissa, your thoughts here give me a lot to work with. I appreciate the relationship dynamics you point out, and you just helped me draw a parallel between Arnold's escape to the barn and his father's escape outside after dark. There's a lot of Arnold's emotions to see in your analysis, and also a lot to explain the modeling he's doing. I also liked your attention to symbolism. I generally hesitate to read into the symbolism too much beyond mood with most writers but it seems appropriate to this story, and maybe GB is known for this use of symbolic imagery. I just picked up the collection so I can read more of her.
Thanks. I think once I started seeing the story this way, everything seemed to support it. I have so many examples in my notes. I think the story is exceptionally masterful.
First, a response to George’s side assignment: Can you reconstruct where your mind’s eye was, in that moment where Arnold was passing through the fence? With him? Inside him? Beside him? Over there with Eugie, looking back?)
For me, with this sentence and line of dialog: Eugie lowered his eyelids, leaving slits of mocking blue. “You’d drown ’fore you got to it, them legs of yours are so puny.” Ms. Berriault brilliantly places us so deeply in Arnold’s POV that we experience him watching Eugie, hearing what he says, seeing himself, considering himself from his brother’s view (which is what he does so much of the time because his brother’s view is all important) which leads to his attention wandering and thus the accident with the gun. Amazing.
I do have one additional question:
I do believe Ms. Berriault wants the reader to understand that Arnold was in shock and not a sociopath or, for some other reason, unable to process the reality and ramifications of what happened. But it’s all written so finely nuanced that this sentence:
When he got up his legs were so stiff that he had to go down on his knees again to ease the pain. Then, walking sideways, he dragged the tub, half full of peas, up the slope.
surprised me because it so definitively indicates the disconnect at that point of his mind to his body, i.e., the state of shock.
Did anyone else have this reaction?
PS – Just have to say thank you, George, for your willingness to be so playful. For some reason, have not been laughing much lately, so your posts, along with blazing up my writing brain, are brightening my heart. Deeply grateful.
The moment where Arnold fell to his knees also struck me. You're definitely getting at what I felt there - this young boy buckling under the weight of unbearable, perhaps even unreal, loss.
Not to get too Christian with my interpretation... but there's also the literal genuflection taking place here. To fall to one's knees is to, perhaps, ask for forgiveness. I'm bowled over at the image of this young boy asking for forgiveness before he's even processed his loss.
Yes, Erica, I had that same reaction upon reading about Arnold's pea-picking. In addition to his legs having stiffened to the point of uselessness, neither had he realized the frozen peas were freezing his fingers. Like you, I took that as evidence of his state of shock--it was too painful to experience so a large part of his consciousness had turned off. And I was thrilled by Gina's genius to not spell it out for us.
Definitely felt the weight of the knee falling. Genuflection and shock, but also there are a number of occasions where I think being on the knees relates to a loss of strength/power/subordination. All fascinating.
I love those lines also. He's coming a little way of the shock right there, and the pain is not just in his knees. Had the sun not hit him right then, he might not have been able to get up later on at all.
(Anything that can make us laugh or even smile right now is welcome. Thank you, Erica, and George.)
At the bottom of The Marginalian’s piece on George Saunders’ Key to Great Storytelling there is a link to The Psychology of What Makes a Great Story, an article by Maria Popova discussing Jerome Bruner’s ideas. The browser tab (https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/01/20/jerome-bruner-actual-minds-possible-worlds-storytelling/) was left open for the past week or so and I kept going back to the text and making sure my thoughts on ’Stone Boy’ corresponded to Bruner’s, shouting loud “yesses” each time. Perhaps I felt happy my brain functioned like Bruner had concluded brains would function when dealing with Great Stories. Equally possible: I am acting like a child, now that I’m in “school” again. And it’s always Fall semester in Story Club, per George’s words. Why is Fall a more appropriate time to learn new things than Spring? Because summertime is far down the road and you don’t think about it -yet. One can concentrate and not worry about staying in, studying. But: what about ‘Stone Boy’?
I will skip to the end. What is ‘Stone Boy’ all about and how has it made me any wiser? How has it made me a better writer? What’s the “virtual text” of my reading journey, the essence I have added to my silo which can be described as “enriching” and will forever escort (or haunt) my future writing and reading? Please, recall young Sylvia Plath’s observation, true of all art and storytelling: “Once a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader.” In my mind, ’Stone Boy’ is primarily about Grief. (In another part of said mind, ’Stone Boy’ is about Duty and Responsibility. In yet another part, ’Stone Boy’ deals with the Social Construction of Reality, using a 9-year old boy as the actor of the transformation of possibilities into certainties.)
During the past few years I experienced major self-reskilling. I completed a career counseling diploma and also some positive psychology. I offer volunteer counseling mainly to older, long-term unemployed; I train them on how to increase their employability. Losing a long-time job is much like losing a family member: people suddenly out of a job are overwhelmed with grief. In 1969, Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described five common stages of grief, popularly referred to as DABDA. They include:
• Denial [avoidance, confusion, shock, fear]
• Anger [frustration, irritation, anxiety]
• Bargaining [struggling for meaning, reaching out to others, telling one’s story]
• Acceptance [exploring options, new plan drawn, moving on]
The model is not linear, people might experience one, some or all of the phases, often concurrently. Yet, these five are the most commonly observed in a grieving population. Grief cannot be “cured”. Rather, medication (antidepressants) and/or counseling can help people better cope, deal with grief effectively and get back on track with everyday life.
The first aspect of the ’Stone Boy’ story that struck me was, unsurprisingly, what a great example it would make to pinpoint the five stages of grief in a “real life situation”. Despite it covering a little over 24 hours in the life of Arnold, the protagonist, all distinct phases are clearly outlined. Gina Berriault has managed to deal with the issue of grief several years before Kübler-Ross (who was a dedicated psychiatrist with tons of field experiences) presented her theory. I am positive this literary masterpiece can be textbook material for psychotherapy students. What makes the story extremely useful is, imho, its open-yet-positive ending. Arnold seems “back on track” the moment he departs for the newborn calf: he has assumed lost brother’s role and “grown up”. Mother is already obviously sorry for her nocturnal resistance and cares. Father is long turned around, the moment he utters “the gun ain’t his no more” in the sheriff’s office: he feels at least as an accessory to the shooting accident for omitting gun education to the minor (despite nobody mentioning this). With family fully backing him, it will be up to Arnold to overcome the negative stance of their social circle and make them see the shock was too much for him to handle in one take but that he can honor the memory of a beloved brother. This I find at least promising. Loved this story!
Thank you, Konstantin, that's really interesting about the stages of grief. I felt on my first read that Arnold was probably doomed, but I have noticed several commentators who held out some hope. It was such a cool complementary experience to read John Gardner's story "Redemption" right after "The Stone Boy." Gardner's story is a fictionalized version of his own true-life experience of having accidentally caused his younger brother's death. The pain in it was overwhelming, and the redemption, or more accurately the healing, comes in such an unexpected yet true-to-life manner. Both stories I think have brought me closer to understanding my own immersions with grief, and guilt, and how to incorporate both.
Hi Nancy, you’re welcome. Someone else in this group was the one who first wrote about it, and provided a link; it must have been on Thursday. I was just incredibly grateful to get to read it. Another wonderful gift. And what an ending!
You have nicely captured the gestures--the unspoken anguish, grief, and hope in this story. I'll add, too, that the gun was a cast off gun. And a side note: I wondered about the larger context of this story set in a world where accidents like this one surely weren't (sadly so) uncommon.
We do get a brief glimpse of father’s instinct to protect his son in the courthouse, and Berriault having him solemnly hold his hat against his chest as he leaves shows some sincerity. So, yes, with mother’s submissive awkwardness, I’m with you, a glimmer of hope for this boy. Your comments are always jam-packed-stuffed with interest, Konstantin - keep ‘em long!
I think what the story does so skillfully is avoid the language that we think might be appropriate to describe the horror. Or maybe what I'm trying to say is that it avoids describing the characters' interior. No attempt is made to describe what Arnold might be feeling - even the parents feelings are hidden in an exterior numbness or shock. The only expression of grief is that Arnold hears his mother's cries in the distance, as she discovers the body. We view this from the outside and lack of words or expression - I think that leaves the reader with almost forcing us to experience it for ourselves. We fill in what we imagine it would feel like, or what is almost impossible to imagine.
While reading the beginning of your post, I wondered whether writing a story in which you introduce a hippo and then never mention the hippo again would work. The point would not be to annoy the reader (though I'm sure it would) but to challenge her assumptions about how life proceeds. I mean, in our daily lives we depend perhaps too much on the security that we know what's coming next and on the idea that everything must happen for a purpose. But maybe that's too much of a gimmick or too contrived. Off-hand, I can't think of a piece of writing where it worked.
You make a good point about the gun going off sooner than we expected. That didn't occur to me, but I see it now. And I appreciated when you wrote, "It takes his feelings all that time to catch up to reality." I think the word that I used in my last comment, "disassociate," is not as good, because it's not as concrete and direct, as "shock." The only value of "disassociate" is the clearer sense of the mind going blank, as if separating from the physical body, and the snap of the divergence. But "shock" is less clinical and more comprehensive.
I look forward to mining this story further. By the way, FWIW, I'm not (yet, at any rate) participating here in order to improve my writing. For the time being, I'm here to learn to read more attentively and thoughtfully -- although I'm getting inspired to try a short story. For me, your method connects the head and the heart better than any literary criticism I've read, most of which leaves me cold. So, thanks for that.
Something that stood out to me about The Stone Boy in particular was its biblical echoes -- the first thing to alert me to the comparison was Arnold's nakedness, both in the opening and in the crucial moment when he knocks at his mother's door, suddenly realizing he is naked as the guilt washes over him.
The parallels aren't neat and tidy, of course, (and they shouldn't be) as the story echoes the myth of Abel and Cain too.
Perhaps someone smarter than me can make something of Berriault's use of bibilcal parallel.
I think if I can ever grasp how anyone could come up with these words in this order I'll have cracked the code of writing. I know that's foolish, but this paragraph is such a perfect representation of the horror of a terrible mistake unfolding that I want to take it apart and understand all of its tiny watch-like mechanisms:
"Arnold pressed down the bottom wire, thrust a leg through and leaned forward to bring the other leg after. His rifle caught on the wire and he jerked at it. The air was rocked by the sound of the shot. Feeling foolish, he lifted his face, baring it to an expected shower of derision from his brother. But Eugie did not turn around. Instead, from his crouching position, he fell to his knees and then pitched forward onto his face. The ducks rose up crying from the lake, cleared the mountain background and beat away northward across the pale sky."
The verbs! pressed, thrust, leaned, caught, jerked, rocked, lifted, baring, turn, crouching, fell, pitched, rose, crying, cleared, beat. HOW DOES SHE DO IT? HOW DID IT TAKE A FOURTH READING FOR ME TO REGISTER ALL OF THIS VIOLENT, EMOTIONAL ACTION IN THIS SEEMINGLY UNDERSTATED PARAGRAPH? Sorry about the caps. And that's just the verbs! I'm just sitting here pressing caps lock and exclamation points. It's so perfect I want to cry.
It's all there in front of you. She's laying out the action one step at a time. He presses down on the wire, then puts his leg through and leans forward. His rifle catches the wire and he pulls on it. The rifle goes off. He turns to see his brother's reaction, but brother had been hit. The ducks react to the sound. (I would have swapped out the ducks and the brother since the ducks would have reacted immediately, but this is more poetic.)
When you're writing, try to break down an action into logical order. That way, it flows. You don't step into a room then open the door. When you learn to start breaking down actions into the steps of that action, then you'll have a clearer idea of how to compose that part of the scene.
She's also using vivid present-tense verbs. Pressed. Thrust. Leaned. Jerked. Rocked. Pitched. Beat. Vivid verbs convey more feeling.
There are so many comments. I can’t read them all right now. So apologies if someone else already raised this. But did anyone else note all the references to seeing/sight/eyes/ covering eyes? Also light/dark and cold/heat. If you go through the story looking for these you can see how Berriault uses them to deepen the story in a way that is not obvious. Not too articulate today. Still buzzed after my daughter’s wedding this past weekend. People, the love in that room! I’m so filled up I gotta say I love you all!
I love the analysis. And believe it wholeheartedly. But for me, the story extends beyond Arnold and Eugie, to family and society. The family is poor, self-sufficient, the children all have critical jobs on the farm, which most children today do not have. And the parents have allowed or encouraged, I don't know which, I'll have to reread to see if there are hints, a rather appalling hierarchy to develop between the boys. Eugie is so contemptuously (IMO, not so H, I guess) superior, he makes my teeth ache. I remember my youthful insecurity and anger at life well enough that in the moment, I was not sorry he died! And then that shocked me, because I was also not surprised that Arnold shot him. Who said, there are no accidents? Of course there are, but most are caused by inattention and carelessness. Crawling through a fence with a loaded gun is not the place for inattention or carelessness. I was and am still deeply sorry for Arnold. But that's still not the end of the story! What is this writer doing to me? Look, she says, at the end, Arnold thaws a bit and tries to ask for his mother's attention, love, understanding. her help. But she refuses. Then later, when her own feelings catch up with her, she hold out a hand to him. And he refuses it! And is, quite sensibly, frightened, I hope I'm not assuming too much to think his own reaction has frightened him.
I love how you put this: "Then later, when her own feelings catch up with her, she holds out a hand to him."
It creates a beautiful parallel between her reaction and her son's, which I hadn't considered. They both shut down in their own ways at Eugie's death, then when their feelings "catch up" with them, when they're seeking for one another, in that vulnerable moment, they each turn the other away.
So tragically human. To me, it's an instinct for self-protection - the lashing out, the isolating ourselves like barbed fences we build as if they could keep the pain out, when really, in the long run, they tend to hurt us more.
It's crushing. But perhaps (to end on a more hopeful note), it can teach us to see the hurt child underneath the stone men we encounter. It might teach us to be a little more forgiving and compassionate with each other.
That wavering by the mother is so well written. She means to be hard with him. She's a hard woman I think, but a tiny maternal instinct kicks in, she weakens ever so slightly and Arnold catches it, and it's that seizing of power that frightens him I think.
For me, the biblical aspects of the story weren't so much thematic (the use of nakedness as a metaphor for shame and loss of innocence), but tonal. After the shooting and right up to meeting with the sheriff, the story pulled me into the same feeling as the Passion - where something bad has happened, and something worse is coming, and time seems to slow down and lose all dimensions, where it seems that every moment is an eternity and, despite knowing something bad is over the horizon, it seems as if the torture leading up to it will never end. Partially, I think the time of day made my mind draw a subconscious link (early morning leading into mid-morning), but mostly I think it was just how much the action did slow down - everything from that point was rendered in such specific, beautiful, torturous detail - the climb to the garden, the pea picking, the scene inside the kitchen, the hay loft, the drive to the courthouse. And then, like in the bible, when the time is finally announced, things speed up to normal time - which is almost a relief, because we are not languishing in the torture of anticipation anymore, but also a tragedy, because now the end has come and there is no hope.
The other thing that really stayed with me was how the story, with all its players, seems to focus on the fractured (beyond repair?) relationship between mother and son (and this could be a biased reading from a mother with a son, but...) - The story seems to zero in on this through its use of detail: When Arnold walks into the kitchen, it is his mother that is described first and most clearly; it his mother whose intentions he intuits ('She wanted, Arnold knew, to see his eyes'), whose reaction to Eugie's death is depicted in the most detail ('sounds sharp as knives rising from her breast') and whose rejection of Arnold comes first and most devastatingly ('No one spoke at supper, and his mother, who sat next to him, leaned her head in her hand all through the meal, curving her fingers over her eyes so as not to see him' (oh, my poor heart breaks for little Arnold)); it is his mother's voice he notices is missing when the visitors call. In fact, the conversation/interaction with his mother is the only one we see playing out in real time after Eugie dies. And I think that loss for Arnold is as keen as the loss of his brother- one that is brought into even sharper, more traumatic, detail with the ending of the story - a cow is up with her calf in the mountain, and someone needs to rescue it before the coyotes come to eat it.
And while the mother is cruel in her rejection - both at the table and in the bedroom - it's not as if she's the bad guy. It's that the story asks the impossible question - how do you love someone who has killed your child? And yet, I'm angry at her, and devastated for Arnold. How does she not see her living child - a nine year old boy - as in shock and suffering serious levels of guilt and shame and self-loathing, and needing comfort and support and love? Her question from behind the bedroom door - "Go back! Is night when you get afraid?" - I had to read that over and over to understand it. Was she saying, is it only at night you feel scared of what you have done? That the demons that should torture you during the day start to come for you? Or was she calling out his childishness, now that she doesn't see him as a child anymore? (which then resonates with the nakedness as unpardonable (for a grown up, but not a child)). Is this the moment when not only the incident, but also his mother, has robbed him of his childhood?
And there is that heartbreaking moment, when his father intervenes for him to pass the pitcher, and 'Arnold, pretending to be deaf to the discord, did not glance up, but relief rained over his shoulders at the thought that his parents recognized him again. They must have lain awake after his father had come in from the yard: had they realized together why he had come down the stairs and knocked at their door?'. (that 'relief rained over his shoulders' - the perfect response to the earlier 'he felt nothing, not grief...only the same immense silence and crawling inside of him, the way the house and fields must feel under a merciless sun') - and it seems, for a brief moment, that the relationship with his mother is not irreparable, that she does know him and see his pain and his need. And then she shatters it - she's still seeking him out, still questioning his heart - she doesn't know why he knocked, she wants him to say it now as if it is something that comes easy and can be spoken in a room full of others and not the dark comfort of her bedroom, where confessions and vulnerability are easier. She wants him to give to her, rather than offer herself (and her comfort) to him. And, I think it is that which hardens him, which turns him to the stone boy.
Through all this, I loved how Berriault treated emotions - emotions were either stated simply (he felt foolish, the same discomfort, he was afraid, a terrifying sound, etc), or they are played out in vignettes - what does grief look like? (a father alone in the silent night, a figure moving alone around the yard). what does rejection look like? (a sister refusing to pass the milk, a mother who shields her eyes so as not to see you). what does shame and guilt look like? (lying like a fugitive in a hay loft, making oneself as small as possible and denying help, comfort, kindness). Never did Berriault ask or answer what does x emotion *feel* like - there is no crying, or heart racing, or stomach twisting, or fingers trembling, or any of those trite micro emotion tells. It's either simple or sweeping in its treatment.
Final thought: there's a real sense that Berriault has spent a lot of time with this story, a lot of care has been given to it - through the repetition and resonance of symbols and words and metaphors. Knowing that all details are chosen (either consciously or unconsciously) during the drafting process or added during the revision process, I found myself wondering whether Berriault chose four ducks on the lake to reflect the number of people in Arnold's family once Eugie had died...
Wonderful work Mikhaeyla. Thank you so much for sharing this with us all.
Those four ducks out in open water reflecting the remaining family - I like that. The willows too have a whole range of associations from Celtic and native American through biblical: the Israelites hung their harps upon the willows and wept over the death of loved ones, wept over their bleak future, and their sin which resulted in God’s judgement. Forever fated to weep.
My goodness, Gina Berriault has left nothing to chance. The pay-off for draft and revision.
Would you believe it, Paul - I must have read The Stone Boy a dozen or more times over the past few days, and I never picked up the repetition of the willows! And, as you point out, it is such a clever and poignant detail - the weeping willows shielding the ducks and their view. And then, when Arnold's family return, they do not return from Eugie's dead body, or the lake, or the obnoxious blood, but from the willows.
These details and their precise selection and placement really do indicate a level of care from the author in her revision. Something to aspire to!
I’ve spent much of this time with Gina's story making drawings and paintings of moments and details which struck me or made me feel something. Naked Arnold outside the door, clambering through the fence, chickens, ducks, the willows. It’s fun to explore different ways to come by insight.
Your insights about the mother's role are so helpful, Mikhaeyla. So much here that I'll remember to come back as needed and keep this well-developed comment as a reference. That is a keen observation about the ducks! And, ooooohhhhh.... wouldn't it be an extraordinary thing to be privy to the drafts of this story in the order GB developed them?
Thank you, Mikhaeyla. I like the way you pointed out the sense of time slowing down and losing its dimensions, the torture that will never end. It's quite amazing how Gina achieved this. The effect of this slowing: I was riveted. The ducks seem to fly northward forever.
I can't remember who said it, but I once read that if you want to increase tension, don't speed things up, slow them down. There's obviously a balance in that (don't drag things out to their death (no pun intended!), but there is something about the agony and ecstasy of staying in a moment of lush detail and high anticipation...
Pardon me if I'm repeating someone else's insight, as I didn't read all of the comments (so many excellent points and subtle nuances you've all pointed out!)... I really appreciate the shorthand Berriault uses in the scene where Arnold knocks on his mother's door. I think she uses the metaphor of the nakedness in the Garden of Eden to express the moment when Arnold fully realizes the gravity of the accident. Before, he may have believed it was an accident and if he just ducked low and hid out, didn't get in anyone's way, maybe they could all move on. But when his mother admonishes him for his fear, "Is night when you get afraid?" -- instead of when he shot his brother -- "Arnold was aware suddenly that he was naked.......and his nakedness had become unpardonable." Unpardonable to his mother, maybe to himself as well. His awareness of his nakedness is the awareness of what he's done and what the rest of his life holds.His shame is like that of Adam and Eve's after they ate the fruit. As the reader, that's where I see what Arnold's future will be like, especially between him and his mother, and for as long as he lives in that house. She will never forgive him. It's masterful how much Berriault makes the reader understand in that one small scene.
Arnold is not the only one in shock. The mother is, the family is. A rural, taciturn family. Many comments are hard on the mother, and the parents. As the author tells the story, she does not know who is behind the door. A small naked boy who does not speak. The family begins to shift and come together again in the story, so slightly, but the boy is scarred for life. But they all are. No mothering will change that. The small milk jug gesture of the father that rights his sister's reaction. For me the pivotal bits were the outsiders, their arrival, the sheriff's 'restless blue eyes'. The story they impose on Arnold, about his coldness when he doesn't act like they think he should. They take over Arnold's narrative for the community.
I was stunned by how accurately Berriault evoked real trauma. I don't know guns and didn't care if I didn't understand how the gun fired, I was with her. For me Arnold was at a stage in his life, 9-10 yrs old, where he is leaving the shelter of his childhood and entering into his adolescence, his shift into the outside world. That's where Berriault leaves us.
Thank you, Joyce, your perspective resonated. It’s brilliant how Berriault is able to depict the traumatized and confused agony of so many characters in the multiplicity of their individuality. And that age is such an important, transformational one, to turn to stone.
I have to say, on my first reading of "The Stone Boy," (was it only a week ago?) I did not think of Chekhov's gun, not right away. When Arnold plucked his rifle off the gun rack I thought of Murphy's Law. This is why I believed: I have seen over and over again how anything that can go wrong will. A nine-year-old with a rifle immediately seemed like bad news.
Another thing I noticed immediately was the tender beauty of the language. "The mountains behind the farm made the sun climb a long way to show itself." Lines like this brought me fully into the world of the story. I knew where I was, and with whom.
It is interesting that Arnold sleeps naked. (I didn't start doing that until I was fifteen!) Something about this makes him even more painfully vulnerable. I like that Gina started out with that.
It's also interesting--and telling--that in the beginning, Arnold seems wide awake, and Eugene is only semi-conscious.
Gina's attention to detail in the paragraph in which the gun goes off is stunning. Clambering through the fence. The sonic blow of the shot. Arnold lifting his face, to take the verbal abuse. Eugene falling, pitching forward. The ducks rising up, calling, the beat of their wings. I think this is another reason I did not question anything; I was part of the scene.
"It was a warmth on his back, like a large hand laid firmly there, that made him raise his head." This also felt perfectly real. "Arnold lay still as a fugitive, listening to the cows eating close by. If his parents never called him, he thought, he would stay up in the loft forever, out of the way. In the night he would sneak down for a drink of water from the faucet over the trough and for whatever food they left for him by the barn." Again, this feels exactly like the mind of a nine-year-old boy. 'I will accept my punishment. I am no longer fit to live among my people. I will stay out of their way. I will only eat if they leave me their scraps.'
The scene where Arnold tries to speak to his mother is at least as heart-wrenching as any of the others, perhaps more so. Gina's gift is that everyone in the story does exactly what they can do, but it is not enough. "He had expected her to tell him to come in and allow him to dig his head into her blankets and tell her about the terror he had felt when he had knelt beside his brother." This astonishing flashback to what he had felt when he realized Eugie had died--had felt but could not know, or process, at the time. (I think, many years ago, it took me weeks, if not months, to know not just in my mind but in my body, in all of my being, that my lover was truly, fatally, completely dead, and not coming back.) It's catching up with him now, yet no one can see it. And he realizes his nakedness, and so do we. And he must flee the light of his father's lantern.
"Then he went out the door and down the back steps, frightened by his answer." I am frightened by it, too. All I can see is a string of years and decades, flattened out, and empty, unless there is a bird or willow or a body or a body of water that can save him, or a memory of his brother. A line of music, or a book. But I believe that more than one person who has read this story may have been saved by it; or might have been able through forgiveness or understanding to save someone else.
I was going to write my own comment, David, but yours touched on something important that happened to me as well. One hook for me was the sheer beauty and prowess of her writing. She laces these pictoral gems within the apparent simplicity of her style. I was entranced by it. I also had some life experience that made it easy to suspend my disbelief. I was walking behind a friend down the furrows of a date orchard. We were returning from hunting during an era when we could walk down our streets and into the open desert with our shotguns on our shoulders. Suddenly his weapon, which was angled back my way, went off. He accidentally pulled the trigger as he stumbled over a dirt clod. We were teens. We were irresponsible and likely high. He forgot to unload his gun and his finger was on the trigger. It could have been disasterous. It happened out of the blue. But the shot went into the trees over my head. So, yeah, that was where I went in that moment. An experience I hadn't thought of in years came rushing up out of my body and joined the tragedy playing out on the page. For me, that passage had remarkable heft in its stark suddenness.
Thank you for that story, Michael. It does seem that much of the time who lives and who dies is simply the luck of the draw—or fate, whatever that mysterious force is.
David I enjoyed reading your thoughts. It's interesting you noted the line "The mountains behind the farm made the sun climb a long way to show itself." I love the language here too. I think it does a great job of showing us how everything Arnold sees is about something/someone having power over something/someone else -it's even in the way he thinks of the sun coming up. That word 'made' is so subtly placed and rings of a child's voice. I've mentioned a in a few other posts that I feel Arnold is really trying to understand his place as the youngest in a family/community.
I too liked that Gina started with noting the nakedness, and I see it a tiny warning sign of negligence (where are those PJs or underwear), who tucks him in (aged nine) and checks he's cozy?. Maybe he wants to be like Eugene, we didn't get to know if Eugene was naked, so I doubt it is that. Also, he doesn't put on underwear beneath his overalls. Is that just demonstrating his practical nature/just being reasonable - like the importance of collecting peas when they're cold?
I love the attention to the detail of getting the boys and the tub through the wire (at different levels -- because Arnold notices that, because he's smaller) I love how our focus is on that so it's the moment we are least expecting the gun to go off, even if we anticipate it will.
Yes to the hand on the back, an incredible line, especially in the light that it never happens. No-one offers him any comfort. No-one suspects he might be in shock. Most mothers and fathers would still want to hug their children after an incident, despite the child's reaction. The fact that the mother tells him to go away from the door, is the most devastating scene, but we have been led to expect it. The sister skips behind worried she might be forgotten, and that's a second mention about worrying about neglect.
I think Arnold retreats to animals and nature as a place to fit in, (staying the barn, eating scraps (like chickens) or where being an animal will get his father's attention or being an animal is easier to do (even when he tries to pounce on Eugene, that has a lion cub feel to it). All that Gina tells us about the world around them in nature, is how Arnold sees it, I think.
It's a incredible story, without a wasted word, with incredible structure, and with layering of meaning at every sentence said and unsaid.
Wow, Marissa. Thank you for taking me even deeper into it! With some of this I merely felt the beauty of the line but missed the significance of the way it rippled out into the world of the story.
I just received my copy of Women In Their Beds. I am so happy to have it.
I hope my copy arrives soon. I am so grateful to find this writer.
So many gifts. Can I live long enough to read everything worth reading? Or find it with fresh eyes in another life?
Sometimes that thought gives me panic attacks, sometimes it gives me a huge sense of comfort.
I know what you mean, Marissa. For me, it’s probably more of a comfort because I feel - with proof from over a half century of reading - that in the hardest times, the knowledge that there is reading to be done gives me comfort and the strength to go on.
You know, David, your comment made me realize what Gina is saying in that last sentence: That Arnold died, too.
I agree with you and David Snider that the end of the story is the end of Arnold as we know him. But I felt his mother and father made two separate gestures that suggested they were "recognizing" him again. One is when the father puts the milk pitcher in front of A and the other is when his mother ask him "humbly" what he wanted when he knocked at her door. The fact that she has paused to even ask him is telling. So I took that to mean that maybe they had begun to feel his pain, even if only a little. And that Arnold dies - is turned to stone - because he is ashamed / aghast to still be among the living, while his brother lies dead. So in a sense, the community and family don't deal the final blow. Arnold does. Arnold ends up being the cruelest of them all - to himself.
Thank you, Lisa, that is so eye-opening. Isn’t that the way it always goes? People are cruel to us, then we incorporate the cruelty, and take the reins.
Oh, absolutely. And it might have turned out different if they had understood and reached out to him before he completely hardened up.
Thank you, Marilyn, I felt that, too. To be unseen, unfelt and unknown is another way to die. I love that this story has a way of stirring the stew of the soul and bringing up something new to think and feel about with every fresh reading. I look forward to reading more work by this writer.
Thank you for this David. I feel deeply moved by the thoughts, associations and experiences you have shared with us here.
Thank you, Paul. It's quite a story. And quite a Substack.
That's all I can see too, and what the story implies for me. Of course it's a story, rather than a person, who could possibly have his life turned around as so many of us have experienced.
David I am so sorry for your loss.
Hi Mary, thank you. It was a rough one, to be sure. But I was lucky to know her, and it has been quite a journey since then, the grace of trying out so many ways to heal.
That is so beautiful
In college, I took a class called “Film and Literature” which met weekly. On odd weeks, we watched a film adapted from a text source (novel, story, letter, poem, essay); on even weeks, we’d invite a guest speaker to talk about her field in a way she thought would be of value/interest to people interested in film translation. One of the guest speaker weeks was — by itself — worth all four years of tuition.
Our speaker was a professor in the History of Art department who specialized in 19th-century French art. He strode onto the stage and, without introduction, projected a slide of two black charcoal smudges, one on top of the other snowman-style, against a pure white background. No scenery or detail; no lighting; just the two round smudges.
After a minute of silence, he asked, “What is this a picture of?” Silence. None of us wanted to make a fool of ourselves.
“Alright…let me make it easier. Is this a person, place, or thing?” After some hemming and hawing, we voted that it was probably a person.
“What kind of person?” Long silence. “What gender…male or female?” [this was back in 1970, when these were the only options publicly acknowledged]
Lots of discussion, but a plurality of us agreed the image was of a female.
“How old is she?” Cries of plaintive outrage from us: all we had to work with were two featureless smudges of black charcoal! How could he expect us to know the figure’s age?
“Well…is this an infant? A teenage girl? A middle aged woman? An elderly woman?” Further discussion. The figure was standing, so not an infant. She had considerably more weight below than above…so older. The discussion proceeded, and, eventually we settled on a woman in late middle age at least.
“Okay. What kind of work does she do? Is she accustomed to hard work with her hands, or does she have a desk job?” “What time of day is it…is she freshly awoken…or exhausted at the end of day?” “Is she walking uphill or down?”
He carried on thus for 58 of minutes of our hour. By then, we’d agreed the picture was of a woman in her late 60’s or early 70’s, she did hard labor of some sort; it was the end of the day, and she was exhausted. Simply by asking us question after question, he dragged her life story out of us.
Finally, our guest speaker told us, “This is a charcoal sketch by the French artist, George Seurat. You’ll all be greatly pleased to know that he called this, ‘The Washerwoman.’ So you all were on the right track. Now, you may ask, why did I put you through this interrogation? You asked me to talk about something in my field that would be of value or interest to people adapting films from text originals. The key point about this exercise for me is that YOU ALREADY HAD ALL THE INFORMATION I DRAGGED OUT OF YOU before I asked, even if you didn’t have fully conscious access to it. Seurat packed all that information into just these two nearly abstract charcoal smudges, and you REGISTERED that information in a flash. Why is that important to you as would-be filmmakers? Because when your audience watches one of your films, they’ll also be registering information and drawing conclusions as quickly as you did, drawing on every detail in the film. So, if you want to have any INTENTIONAL influence on what your audience experiences as they watch, you need to be completely aware of — and to control — what’s present in every part of every frame.”
And with that, he took down his slide and walked off.
Now, why did I tell you all this?
First, I’d like to say, with more than a little awe, how much everyone’s comments here justify that long-ago guest speaker’s (and Seurat’s) faith that members of the audience (readers/viewers) absorb every detail, even without consciously having realized it.
Second (this may be a little jarring), while I love this story — am quite blown away by its power — I find myself persistently troubled by one detail in the geography of the gun’s firing (and I hope someone can clear it up for me):
Eugie has already gone under the fence ahead of Arnold. Now Arnold is struggling through as well. He’s most of the way under. If the trigger catches on the fence, he must be holding the gun by its muzzle end, and the gun must be pointed forward in order to hit Eugie. But if Arnold is mostly through the fence himself and tugging on the gun when it snags, how could pressure on the back of the trigger cause it to fire? Is there something somehow physically wrong about the scene as described? or am I merely mis-seeing the scene?
I’m feeling a bit blasphemous and ashamed of myself to be asking such a petty question (against the majesty and understated power of everything else in the story). But the question troubled me even in my first reading, and I’ve been struggling with it ever since.
OK, you're all overthinking here, I say, but I'm also over-posting now, so whatever... let's chat. For a reader, it's about believability. You're a tough crowd, you who are familiar with the handling of rifles. We're so hard on this writer because we're analyzing what works for us and what doesn't. Not everyone is sold on the details, clearly, but most are. Most are sold. Again: most are sold on what she has written here, as am I. I'm taking away that message because that is where a writer's power resides. It's the one issue that matters to writers wanting to influence readers. (I say it all the time to my kids: the people who tell the stories that are believed are the most powerful people in the world and across time.) Nonetheless, you asked so I'll offer an answer regarding the gun logistics since no one else has responded so far, and this piece invites us to be focused on guns, gun safety, and potentially the politial issues surrounding all that... Arnold's rifle is an old lever-action rifle (no safety switch) that functions much like the BB guns the kids in my generation and region grew up with. BBs were always gonna put someone's "eye out" but a .22 can do damage. A .22 bullet in the right place will kill. It's a starter gun for hunter kids. That it was a .22 Arnold pulled off the kitchen wall told me some things I believed. That is was old and without a safety in the hands of a 9yo, well I knew what was coming and that it wasn't ducks. That the setup was so clean, I believed the unfolding. The narrow fence pass-through and the lax atmosphere, a snag... In my mind, inside of Arnold, I'd already loaded and levered the gun back in the kitchen because I'm a kid trying to be a grown-up, not someone fresh out of gun safety class. I'd carried it behind my big brother through the narrow opening in the barbed-wire fence (that's what it was in my mind because most modern wire fences are crossed, and anything only horizontal is electric now if not still barbed), and the trigger inside the lever is what caught on the (barbed) wire. Jerking it forward, pulled the trigger back... I believed from inside of Arnold. All of it. The light rifle goes off with a low bang, more than the pop of a BB, enough to scare ducks, enough to kill if it hits in the right place. That place we were told to look on the second page (239).
Bruce & Mikhaeyla, these are both really good points that I hope others will attend to. The writer had a purpose, but this gun handling conduct isn't standard operating procedure for people who are familiar with gun culture for the story's era (or any era, really). To imply that it is gets into the influence of story, and that is what is important for us to grasp as writers. This is a story about the psychology of a type of culture and I saw generational trauma in it, myself. I think it's also about poverty, neglect, larger socioeconomic issues, and a lot of stuff besides guns. It's whatever lands on us and moves us, but the writer had motives for it. Don't we all? Is that just me? What were they, her motives? Do we see them? Was she successful?
(Having written and deleted a really long response) I think it's enough to say that a writer creates a story with certain intentions - and these intentions can be intuited by how they craft the story (what they focus on, how they order information, how they create contrast, how the story escalates and is resolved) - but that, despite these intentions, they can't maintain full control on what meaning is taken from a story. As you say - different things land on and move different people - we all come to stories from different starting points (our own interests, biases, motivations, hang-ups), and these will influence whether we see the signposts created by the author, whether we miss them, or whether we misread them. What can we take from that as writers? 1. Your story ceases to be your story as soon as you publish it, and 2. The more subtle your are in your treatment, the more you invite the reader to fill the gaps/sharpen the image (which is vulnerable to all kinds of divergent views and interpretations). Not necessarily a bad thing - it's like what George says about Chekhov: his stories create in the reader a question of whether something is this or that / good or bad, and Chekhov answers 'yes'. Maybe great stories are there to *move* us, not *mould* us?
PS Just discovered Konstantin's comment, which offers a similar take on this and links to a great Marginalian article: https://georgesaunders.substack.com/p/the-stone-boy-3/comment/5172562
PPS And, of course, Berriault answers this question more eloquently herself in the interview Annie posted (https://georgesaunders.substack.com/p/the-stone-boy-3/comment/5174739):
Q. You’ve said, “Between the lines of every story, readers write their own lines, shaping up the story as a collaborative effort.” As the writer are you concerned about controlling or directing the reader’s lines, with the question of a “correct” interpretation?
A. Of course the writer wishes to compel and persuade and entice and guide the reader to a comprehension of the story, but there’s no such thing as a “correct” interpretation of a piece of fiction. That’s demanding a scientific precision of the writer. Each reader’s interpretation originates in his or her life’s experiences, in feelings and emotions of intensely personal history. You get more from what you read as you grow older, and your choices change, and, wiser, you bring more to that collaborative effort.
Thank you, that’s great. I have read somewhere that a good story is only completed by one reader at a time engaging with it in their own unique way.
Traci- I think that is a really insightful look into this story. For me, I wondered: what’s more dangerous, a boy with a small gun or a mother who turns her back on her terrified, guilt-ridden son? And then there’s the rest of the adults with their stoic, distant review of the tragedy. I think this is a story about a failure of family and community. It was stacked against Arnold from the start. He was bound to over reach in one way or another, seeking acknowledgement and approval. The gun just happened to be the tool that day.
Kurt, I appreciate your comments. I was struck, too, by the adult's stoicism. That raised the biggest internal question in my: "Where are these people coming from? What is this culture?" The mother evidenced her grief by the wail Arnold heard as his family returned from the site of the shooting. And then she closed her heart to Arnold. As unsympathetic as this was, I found that I was able to entertain it as one of a number of possible grief and shock reactions. She blamed Arnold, who was the most proximal human cause. I was able to extend some compassion to her, and hoped that it would turn out to be temporary. But I was horrified for Arnold--how that shunning must have cut into his fragile psyche. It could have really "sealed the deal" for me to project a horribly scarred and stunted development for Arnold and his future. Finally, even the father, I was able to hold in some compassion. In the immediate shock of a child's death, and the tragically messed up way that it happened, almost anything goes. This, unfortunately, comes at the cost of personal experience. It is another way that this story was able to hook me into its believability. I held the whole family and close community in compassion. This is an event that changes the trajectory of many interconnected lives, for good or ill. It exceeds the ability to cope in any of the unrealistic ways we heap upon it, with our mandates for forgiveness and letting go. Society acts as if a great act of grace were an obligation. We do move on, if we survive, but with a giant hole clean through us, which will never close. These expectations and the trite advice and aphorisms that come with them can only serve to make us feel more alone. Yet even the perpetrators of these things are in need of compassion, for they are only trying to comfort themselves from the close touch of death in a death phobic culture.
Traci, thanks for this perfect, 100%, description of how the gun fired.
The tiny quibble I'd have is with Arnold chambering a round in the kitchen. There weren't gun safety classes in the '50s (that I was aware of), but I believe most kids had drilled into them that you don't chamber a round before you intend to shoot. So that was a mini-moment for suspension of disbelief for me... not a problem at all.
I think the omission of the chambering was a stylistic choice (rather than logical choice) - if Berriault had included that detail in the story, it would have ruined her sleight of hand; if she'd included it earlier (in the kitchen), there would be no way we would have been distracted or put at ease by the trip to the lake, and if she had mentioned it on the way to the lake, she would have been telegraphing what was about to happen. By leaving it out, she allows us to infer (in retrospect) that it happened somewhere along the way. And it works, because the shooting isn't really the point of the story, what comes next is; so that if some details are vague around the edges, it's the details that don't matter.
I agree, Mikhaeyla. It might have been an intentional omission. Specifically mentioning putting a bullet in the chamber would have dissolved almost any ambiguity I had about whether there was going to be an accident involving the gun. It would have worked like a blunt instrument. Nothing else I read in this piece worked that way. I still had some doubt. I still wanted to hope this was a warm, boyhood tale about a little brothers worship of his elder. Arnold could have chambered the bullet when he saw the ducks on the lake, before he ducked to step through the fence. That's when I would have done it as hunting boy. What surprised me is that he didn't put the gun down or lean it on a post before he stepped over. But he was trying to show his smooth competence, what he imagined would be his grownup ability to do such a thing without undue attention--step through in one, graceful motion and be ready to fire. That is what my brain registered as it was happening. That is how I worked when I was a boy--always fretting about making a good impression on the elders, of appearing worthy to be accepted into the brotherhood.
Michael, your point about Arnold trying to project a confidence and skill he didn't quite have yet - "trying to show his smooth competence, what he imagined would be his grownup ability to do such a thing without undue attention" - that hit so true to me. He idolises his brother, his brother has just offered to do the dirty work of getting the duck if he shoots it (because he sees Arnold as puny and likely to drown if he attempts it), and Arnold - who wants the respect of a brother who has just narrowed his eyes to 'slits of mocking blue' - wants to seem as smooth and competent as his beloved Eugie. Poor kid - this new revelation just makes my heart break louder for him...
I wondered about that too but on page 268, top of page, end of paragraph, Berriault writes, Then he sad down on the stool and began to load his gun. It's a good question to ponder as when the gun goes off and Arnold reacts the way he does. It's here, when we ask ourselves as George says in the post, An Incident, Part Two, Dynamism: are we at one with him, do we trust him? We circle back in the narrative for clues to help make that assessment.
Absolutely right. Thanks!
Thank you for this. I have a sculptor friend who draws with only a piece of charcoal in his hand. He says he wants as much direct contact as possible between his hand and the paper. 'To see the hand in the line. Everything on the paper is in the line'.
I don't think the fence wire caught on the trigger. I think it caught on, or just bumped, the hammer. I was also curious about the mechanics of this and went into it a little in an earlier post (https://georgesaunders.substack.com/p/the-stone-boy-2/comment/5142271?utm_source=url). I don't know if I'm right, but I can at least picture it more easily now.
Thanks, Alex…your earlier post did it for me. I came into the conversation late and so had missed a lot of earlier discussion of the gun. Wish I’d seen your comments earlier…would have saved me a lot of fruitless pondering.
You’ve taken he scenic route in, but yes, I’m troubled by this too, because I don’t fully SEE it; in fact there are story milliseconds I’ve papered over there, and I’ve been in a rush to forgive based the strength of the rest of the story and the forward momentum of those moments, and whether it’s all that important, I’m not sure, but there’s a residual clot—or smudge—that has lingered. Is it possible this is a flaw left in place, or simply a flaw? Is it a strategy used to further push us off balance? Because it still troubles me, however slightly, I have to wonder.
I wondered if the reason we can't work it out as we are in Arnold's head. With him as he is looking at the ground (?), his mind focused forward to the ducks, listening to E talk about going in to get the duck if A shoots one. The gun snaring on the fence registers only as resistance, weight in his hand, A pulls at it without looking. He knows it's gone off by sound, not by sight, but doesn't even know in what direction the shot is fired. He waits to be yelled at, still not really looking. Until E doesn't yell at him, and then he realises something is wrong. Like him, we are left surprised, shocked, confused... my mind accepts A's POV- I only know what he knows, thinks, sees, hears. Guns aren't common where I live, and I know little about them, but I accept A's confusion as someone who didn't see what happened and can only guess.
Emma, having read several posts now about how the firing of the gun actually occurred, your post has resonated with me the most. We are inside A's head and he is not fully focused on the gun, therefore we are not focussed on it either, Arnold is trying to follow Eugie deftly through the fence, and on living up to his brother's "almost a man-ness."
This thread has been quite an education! As someone who doesn't know guns at all, nor the one in the story, the mechanism question didn't occur to me. It has helped me understand as per comments above, that a writer will convince some people with the way they handle an object, the description of it and how it is used, how much detail they add; and they will not convince others. A question of life experience?
A great lesson in any case: as a writer you will not please everyone.
I also imagined the gun's barrel pointing backwards, in the direction from which they came. I had to bend my mind a bit to imagine Arnold maneuvering it the other way through the fence, with the barrel pointing towards his brother. It does make a difference in the mind's eye. Still, when the air is "rocked by the sound of the shot," I got what happened, as I'm sure you did.
Also, nice lead-up to that.
Thanks for posting this story about your class. Talk about seeing the whole world in "a grain of sand"...Wow. I think your four years of tuition just paid dividends for me too. I might owe you money...And as for the gun, though as Traci points out this might be getting off the real point, an old lever action .22 has a hammer exposed at the back. Pulling it and releasing it has the same effect as pulling the trigger. It sticks out and is easy to snag on something like a fence wire. If we wanted to get more psychological and metaphorical here...it's a small, powerful, vulnerable lever - not unlike the longing that exists in Arnold's heart.....
This post about the art professor was so wonderful to read, thank you. Resonates with so many things I've heard from both spiritual teachers (It's all inside you already) to writings like "Blink" which state that humans make up their mind/know in the first 8 seconds of meeting someone or thing whether it is true or false, for a lack of better words in this moment - thinking without thinking, knowing without knowing.
So glad it resonated with you, Nancy!
Yeah, I was troubled by that too--wait, where were both of them and how did a fence trigger the shot? Upon a second reading, I wasn't sure Eugie was standing up yet and as for the trigger, hammer, lever--I just accepted that it happened and moved on. In the sheriff's office, there was uncertainty about what triggered it to go off and that eased my mind--they weren't sure. It was a freak accident.
Thank you, your story about the guest speaker in 1970 and Seurat is mind-expanding. One of my thoughts is as a writer to pay full attention to the right details, not too many, and not too few: the proper proportion, with which a vast variety of readers can engage so that the story will live and grow and ask its necessary questions within the minds of most of them.
I agree that paying attention to everything (without distinction) would be a mistake. A good part of my career was devoted to researching, writing, and producing scrupulously realistic re-enactments of actual events in the workplace as the basis for assorted training programs. While my films were faithful er-enactments of things that actually happened, they were NOT (and could not be) mere recordings of the actual events. Instead, I aimed to make them intelligent paraphrases of the original designed to throw salient elements of drama and key applications of effective interpersonal skill — or opportunities for such applications — into relief.
I can't remember if it was a Pixar guy, but some showrunner/director said that one of the tricks for involving an audience is to give them everything they need to put two and two together, but not spoonfeed them the answer. Let them find that on their own and they will appreciate it more. This is actually best shown in Agatha Cristie's works - she always puts the clues right out in front of you, but you don't understand them until she shows you how they fit together.
As to believability, the purpose of a story is to hypotize you, draw you in. The moment your conscious mind starts going "wait a minute..." then you're out of the story. That's why detail and motivation are so important. You have to believe someone would do whatever they're doing, and detail shows they can do it. That's one of the problems I had with Stone Boy - to me it's not a story, but the recounting of an incident, and the two are not necessarily the same. Story, to me, would carry though to tell the effect this had on the characters and how it changed them. A lot of modern short story writers seem to dread actually finishing a story instead of just stopping. I feel cheated as a reader, and I think it's actually a little insulting to the characters since it leaves them hanging in limbo. My characters would scream bloody murder at me if I did that to them.
Although I loved the writing in this story, my "wait a minute" moment was in having to believe a 9 year old would respond to accidentally shooting his brother by calmly going to pick peas rather running back to his parents crying and screaming. Sure, denial can be very powerful, but this powerful? For a 9 year old? It didn't work for me, so for the rest of the story this was looming large. Not the way the shooting happened but the response to it. It felt contrived.
Hi John. My reaction to Arnold going to pick peas was that he knew he’d done wrong and he was going to get into trouble so if he picked the peas while they were cold that would be one less thing to get into trouble over. The enormity of what he’d done hadn’t sunk in then, but living in an agricultural area, he knew that it was essential that the crops were picked and preserved at the right time of day to see the family through the year. Perhaps his nine year old brain thought that by picking the peas he was helping to preserve his family, even if he couldn’t save his brother? Just a thought…
Thanks for your thoughts Alison. Maybe some kids could compartmentalize that way, but I can't imagine too many. I hope not too many anyway. I find it chilling that any 9 year old could watch his brothers blood drain out of the back of his head and then calmly go pick peas for an hour. That is more serious denial than I would think possible. Run away and hide out of shock and fear maybe, but not pick peas. Oh well, I'm the only one that seemed to bother or surprise, so it's probably just me.
I think it's interesting to follow the duck's being out of season and how that imbues the story with a sense of transgression. The brother warns him but apparently doesn't really care. It hangs over the walk down to the pond. It adds drama to the walk as they are careful not only to avoid disturbing the ducks but also not to be seen doing it. Slipping under the fence is a trespass of some kind. Maybe it's their own fence but it's a demarcation. There's a crime on the other side of this wire. It goes from something that seems simply naughty that any adult would simply admonish against on its onw. But duck hunting out of season is the most direct crime the adults discuss. They never say "murder" but they do judge him for the petty crime. It's all part of them framing him as a bad seed. The sheriff will see him later, surely.
This is interesting-- and then the moment where Arnold realizes he is naked and runs back to his room is not just the loss of innocence/end of childhood, but also his realization that he is, in fact, the bad seed they all treat him as.
True! And that moment brought to mind the Garden of Eden. Arnold has eaten of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil and discovered his nakedness and shame.
I thought of this as well, particularly given the matching initials of Arnold and Eugie with Adam and Eve, which I imagine was intentional, maybe just for this purpose.
I agree Kevin, in terms of how it imbues the story with a sense of transgression. It also helps to set up a misdirection which makes the moment the brother is shot all the more shocking. We, the reader, have our gaze fixed on the ducks in the distance (perhaps having misgivings about hunting out of season) and then the gun goes off.
Interesting take on transgression one leading to another. Creating unease as something being off kilter....
I love the repetition of the duck shooting not being in season too. I get the sense it has three purposes 1)to show Arnold up for not knowing (as Arnold is used to being belittled) 2) to keep the gun in play all the time 3) to reenforce the need for rules in their community. The sheriff had an opinion there didn't he, he couldn't hold that in. "That's bad". The father is surprised when the sheriff doesn't want to keep Arnold - it seems not least because of the shooting season issue. I would have imaged a father, even if my son had behaved emotionally subdued to be grateful and relieved, not questioning, at this point.
1) I didn’t get a chance to respond to the last post; I read most of the comments and appreciated the insights. Thank you.
2) “How does Gina Berriault make us believe in the accident on which ‘The Stone Boy’ depends?” Had I read this story when I was younger (than now!), I might have missed the “how” of that which unfolds and maybe not bought into it (or refused to). Because when we are young we refuse to accept/ understand that while we are the “master of our fate”, there is so much we can’t control. Ever. Life is uncertain and it happens. It all happens. And we create illusions of control and call it living.
But more to the how: we as readers know life happens. And continues. And people think what they think about what’s happened. And they think what they think about what and how we were part of that which happens.
In terms of the how RE craft: in her own words in an interview she states, “And when you take the reader as your equal, your work isn’t affected or false. You establish that collaboration, that shared intuitiveness.”
I think that’s how she does it. She is counting on the reader to intuitively know accidents happen. And we are as surprised as we would be in real life. We can’t quite accept what’s happened and yet it happened!
Here is the interview.
https://indexarticles.com/arts/literary-review/dont-i-know-you-an-interview-with-gina-berriault/
There is a lot to admire in that interview: writing as a woman, working class writers, gaps between writing, and so much more. What a woman!
I knew nothing of her and her works before this story. Now I am reading as much as possible. Obsessively.
Thank you.
Thank you for the Berriault link, Annie! Her honesty has answered many questions I was mulling over re: the writing path.
Thank you for posting the link to this interview. When she says, “Between the lines of every story, readers write their own lines, shaping up the story as a collaborative effort", that was very much the experience I had with her story.
Also, loved that she shared this - "...I destroy much of what I write or I can’t work out what I want to say and I put the piece aside. The longing to write and the writing never cease.... And there’s the disbelief, so often at my elbow as I write, that I can write at all." This, this, from the writer of The Stone Boy!
Annie, thank you so much for this link to the interview with Gina Berriault...it is amazing...she knew what it was to be poor...and her description of the relationship between reader and author is wonderful and true.
I have, as others have, ordered her collection…
but after reading that interview (I am sure there are other essays and interviews), I can’t help wondering: would she be allowed to be published today? and if her lack of being mainstream (as the interviewer asserts, she should be even better appreciated) is…sort of…intentional?
…the publishing industry went from championing to silencing voices outside establishments…
I don't think her lack of being mainstream was intentional. She taught herself how to write creatively and that was a very tough go. In that regard, she was an "outsider artist" but she did eventually get lots of recognition. In the maritime world, someone who starts on deck in the lowliest job and works their way up to be captain/master mariner is said to have "come up through the haws'pipe." A hawser being the heavy line that ships are tied up with. In effect, they've clawed their way up through an narrow and sometimes nasty path to a post of respect. I think Gina definitely came up through the haws'pipe in the literary world. Robert Stone was like that. His collection of stories "Bear and his Daughter" is excellent. I believe he spent many years as a smuggler in the Caribbean.
As far as the publishing goes, I don't think they necessarily silence voices outside the establishment...I just think they're not willing to take the risks anymore that they used to take.
Another thanks for the link to the interview, Annie. When I first read The Stone Boy I had a deep need to hear Berriault's voice, I guess to know her as a person as well as a writer. The interview fills in more of who she is for me. Such a remarkable woman.
Thank you so much, Annie, for your thoughts—and for the link!
Oof. This story is so quiet and devastating and beautiful. Biblical is certainly the word. I loved it. I hated it. The writing is on another level.
But I wanted to comment from a non-writing angle. So much of my work over the last five years has dealt with child sexual abuse. Its devastation is always twofold: the incident itself and reaction of the community afterwards. Because a child doesn't respond to trauma in a way that adults think they're "supposed to," they're often not believed. Their lack of emotion or recall makes adults think they're making it up. I've watched entire communities turn on child abuse survivors. I've watched those children believe, as Arnold does, other people's assessment of themselves.
All of this is to say that Gina Berriault's story so accurately and devastatingly depicts this trauma cycle that I couldn't read it without my heart in my throat.
Loved your comment and your description of the story. It mirrors very much how I felt. I feel that tension of loving it and hating it at the same time.
Thank you, Rachel. I suppose every child reacts to trauma in their own unique way. Shutting down is probably quite common. As a child, as an adult. And I think especially when a child feels betrayed by adults; or, by life.
Since reading this post, I realise I may have had a different and personal reading of the Stone Boy. I read some cruelty in Arnold's emotionally deprived life and that that is a factor in his reaction after the accident. i.e. the shooting tests a behavioural strategy he's learned and applies under extreme stress. I enjoyed the story, and it moved me.
To me the story questions the role of emotion when faced with the business of survival. I have known people, and have been known myself, to bury emotions by being practical. I have seen that this kind of behaviour can be misread as uncaring. I recognise that I work hard to interpret people’s feelings towards me, and I am guilty of projecting my esteem of myself into their estimation of me. The story made me value clear emotional expression and made me want to aim to try to express more positive emotion as an act of kindness. I didn't see much kindness (other than Eugene's) towards Arnold. It is a moral artefact because it presents evidence that if we withhold emotion, those around us are confused and may be likely to do so towards us too.
I read that the story subtly and repeatedly makes important points on how to view power when you are nine and from a farming family and the importance of being practical/reasonable to be powerful (in the world Arnold lives in), and what it means to be normal, and how without the emotional cues something can be labelled or misread because we have a tendency to project an emotional response, in the absence of understanding.
From the first paragraph, I immediately felt concern for Arnold. I had a suspicion of negligence which became compounded as the story progresses. The writer starts with tiny details on the first page and ramps the level of concern with a Chekov’s gun at the top of page two. From the fact that the poor kids doesn't wear PJs or underwear (okay, that might be personal choice) to the fact he is nine and has his own rifle. I have the sense Arnold wants to be like/equal to Eugene, and to be a good son in the eyes of his father, and that's what drives him but it's also what confuses him.
I immediately felt the story wanted us to see how it might be for a boy to learn where he fits into the family, what power he has now, and the power others have over him, when he might be able to grow or gain further power. He know's size, knowledge, age, maleness, attitude to work, come into it, but he hasn't fully grasped that acceptance/compliance of norms (crying like a baby following trauma) and rules (shooting in duck season) are as important as they are.
I think the story establishes a norm, where a lack of human emotional modelling (he seems to fear being told off or ridiculed) and this encourages Arnold to find an affinity with nature/animalism. He retreats to nature to feel safe, and looks to nature for answers on how to behave. He has been brought up to believe that it's good to be practical for survival, and that makes a person powerful, resilient, strong.
Arnold spends a lot of energy seeking and projecting meaning in people’s bodies, words, expressions, responses, but no-one around him is particularly emotional, and yet they accuse him of being a stone boy. Though Eugene was kind, he could also be belittling, and his father though just seems pretty emotionless, (the milk pitcher moment) and his mother and sister demonstrate that they can show unkindess towards him: to deny comfort and an opportunity to be forgiven, to deny sustenance (milk pitcher).
Though Arnold is not not outwardly emotional, which absolutely is compounded by shock, I have the sense that it's also a learned suppression similar to that which he sees around him. I carefully looked at everyone's reactions to him, and they are all stoney. But we know Arnold experiences love for Eugie, loneliness, a low sense of worth, a sense of duty, confusion, envy, fear, shame, rejection, and relief, he just doesn’t know how to demonstrate those feelings, because no-one around him tends to show one’s feelings.
I seemed to keep finding symbols in the story that I felt got cleverly replayed:
The sun: power
The peas: survival
The willows: a place of safety
The pale sky (emotionless)
Sloping field: the struggle at home
Being on one’s knees: weakened power
The mountains: obstacle to overcome
The rocker: A place of hopeful homely comfort.
Nakedness: Uncomplicated by ‘norms’
I thought it was so interesting that Arnold (for all the accusations of being emotionally cold) is a keen observer of the importance of people’s body language, the position of their eyes, their height/standing in relation to one another. He is in a family which isn't demonstratively loving and this had me totally consumed. Who do we become when we are not sure we are loved? We try to be more of something, more grown up, more practical, more quiet, more like a cow in a shed, or more of what we think others might want from us.
Great question, who do we become when we're not sure we are loved. Exactly.
The first mention of Arnold’s parents stuck out to me: “He got up from the floor and went down the stairs, the laughter continuing, like hiccups, against his will. But when he opened the staircase door and entered the parlor, he hunched up his shoulders and was quiet because his parents slept in the bedroom downstairs.” He’s afraid of waking them.
Wow! Marissa, your thoughts here give me a lot to work with. I appreciate the relationship dynamics you point out, and you just helped me draw a parallel between Arnold's escape to the barn and his father's escape outside after dark. There's a lot of Arnold's emotions to see in your analysis, and also a lot to explain the modeling he's doing. I also liked your attention to symbolism. I generally hesitate to read into the symbolism too much beyond mood with most writers but it seems appropriate to this story, and maybe GB is known for this use of symbolic imagery. I just picked up the collection so I can read more of her.
Thanks. I think once I started seeing the story this way, everything seemed to support it. I have so many examples in my notes. I think the story is exceptionally masterful.
Thank you for so beautifully expressing what I have been thinking and feeling and do not have the skill to write.
First, a response to George’s side assignment: Can you reconstruct where your mind’s eye was, in that moment where Arnold was passing through the fence? With him? Inside him? Beside him? Over there with Eugie, looking back?)
For me, with this sentence and line of dialog: Eugie lowered his eyelids, leaving slits of mocking blue. “You’d drown ’fore you got to it, them legs of yours are so puny.” Ms. Berriault brilliantly places us so deeply in Arnold’s POV that we experience him watching Eugie, hearing what he says, seeing himself, considering himself from his brother’s view (which is what he does so much of the time because his brother’s view is all important) which leads to his attention wandering and thus the accident with the gun. Amazing.
I do have one additional question:
I do believe Ms. Berriault wants the reader to understand that Arnold was in shock and not a sociopath or, for some other reason, unable to process the reality and ramifications of what happened. But it’s all written so finely nuanced that this sentence:
When he got up his legs were so stiff that he had to go down on his knees again to ease the pain. Then, walking sideways, he dragged the tub, half full of peas, up the slope.
surprised me because it so definitively indicates the disconnect at that point of his mind to his body, i.e., the state of shock.
Did anyone else have this reaction?
PS – Just have to say thank you, George, for your willingness to be so playful. For some reason, have not been laughing much lately, so your posts, along with blazing up my writing brain, are brightening my heart. Deeply grateful.
The moment where Arnold fell to his knees also struck me. You're definitely getting at what I felt there - this young boy buckling under the weight of unbearable, perhaps even unreal, loss.
Not to get too Christian with my interpretation... but there's also the literal genuflection taking place here. To fall to one's knees is to, perhaps, ask for forgiveness. I'm bowled over at the image of this young boy asking for forgiveness before he's even processed his loss.
Yes, Erica, I had that same reaction upon reading about Arnold's pea-picking. In addition to his legs having stiffened to the point of uselessness, neither had he realized the frozen peas were freezing his fingers. Like you, I took that as evidence of his state of shock--it was too painful to experience so a large part of his consciousness had turned off. And I was thrilled by Gina's genius to not spell it out for us.
Definitely felt the weight of the knee falling. Genuflection and shock, but also there are a number of occasions where I think being on the knees relates to a loss of strength/power/subordination. All fascinating.
I love those lines also. He's coming a little way of the shock right there, and the pain is not just in his knees. Had the sun not hit him right then, he might not have been able to get up later on at all.
(Anything that can make us laugh or even smile right now is welcome. Thank you, Erica, and George.)
At the bottom of The Marginalian’s piece on George Saunders’ Key to Great Storytelling there is a link to The Psychology of What Makes a Great Story, an article by Maria Popova discussing Jerome Bruner’s ideas. The browser tab (https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/01/20/jerome-bruner-actual-minds-possible-worlds-storytelling/) was left open for the past week or so and I kept going back to the text and making sure my thoughts on ’Stone Boy’ corresponded to Bruner’s, shouting loud “yesses” each time. Perhaps I felt happy my brain functioned like Bruner had concluded brains would function when dealing with Great Stories. Equally possible: I am acting like a child, now that I’m in “school” again. And it’s always Fall semester in Story Club, per George’s words. Why is Fall a more appropriate time to learn new things than Spring? Because summertime is far down the road and you don’t think about it -yet. One can concentrate and not worry about staying in, studying. But: what about ‘Stone Boy’?
I will skip to the end. What is ‘Stone Boy’ all about and how has it made me any wiser? How has it made me a better writer? What’s the “virtual text” of my reading journey, the essence I have added to my silo which can be described as “enriching” and will forever escort (or haunt) my future writing and reading? Please, recall young Sylvia Plath’s observation, true of all art and storytelling: “Once a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader.” In my mind, ’Stone Boy’ is primarily about Grief. (In another part of said mind, ’Stone Boy’ is about Duty and Responsibility. In yet another part, ’Stone Boy’ deals with the Social Construction of Reality, using a 9-year old boy as the actor of the transformation of possibilities into certainties.)
During the past few years I experienced major self-reskilling. I completed a career counseling diploma and also some positive psychology. I offer volunteer counseling mainly to older, long-term unemployed; I train them on how to increase their employability. Losing a long-time job is much like losing a family member: people suddenly out of a job are overwhelmed with grief. In 1969, Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described five common stages of grief, popularly referred to as DABDA. They include:
• Denial [avoidance, confusion, shock, fear]
• Anger [frustration, irritation, anxiety]
• Bargaining [struggling for meaning, reaching out to others, telling one’s story]
• Depression [overwhelmed, helplessness, hostility, flight]
• Acceptance [exploring options, new plan drawn, moving on]
The model is not linear, people might experience one, some or all of the phases, often concurrently. Yet, these five are the most commonly observed in a grieving population. Grief cannot be “cured”. Rather, medication (antidepressants) and/or counseling can help people better cope, deal with grief effectively and get back on track with everyday life.
The first aspect of the ’Stone Boy’ story that struck me was, unsurprisingly, what a great example it would make to pinpoint the five stages of grief in a “real life situation”. Despite it covering a little over 24 hours in the life of Arnold, the protagonist, all distinct phases are clearly outlined. Gina Berriault has managed to deal with the issue of grief several years before Kübler-Ross (who was a dedicated psychiatrist with tons of field experiences) presented her theory. I am positive this literary masterpiece can be textbook material for psychotherapy students. What makes the story extremely useful is, imho, its open-yet-positive ending. Arnold seems “back on track” the moment he departs for the newborn calf: he has assumed lost brother’s role and “grown up”. Mother is already obviously sorry for her nocturnal resistance and cares. Father is long turned around, the moment he utters “the gun ain’t his no more” in the sheriff’s office: he feels at least as an accessory to the shooting accident for omitting gun education to the minor (despite nobody mentioning this). With family fully backing him, it will be up to Arnold to overcome the negative stance of their social circle and make them see the shock was too much for him to handle in one take but that he can honor the memory of a beloved brother. This I find at least promising. Loved this story!
Thank you, Konstantin, that's really interesting about the stages of grief. I felt on my first read that Arnold was probably doomed, but I have noticed several commentators who held out some hope. It was such a cool complementary experience to read John Gardner's story "Redemption" right after "The Stone Boy." Gardner's story is a fictionalized version of his own true-life experience of having accidentally caused his younger brother's death. The pain in it was overwhelming, and the redemption, or more accurately the healing, comes in such an unexpected yet true-to-life manner. Both stories I think have brought me closer to understanding my own immersions with grief, and guilt, and how to incorporate both.
Thank you for pointing me to the Gardner story. I will need to read it again, and again. Yes, the pain, and then the opening to life.
Hi Nancy, you’re welcome. Someone else in this group was the one who first wrote about it, and provided a link; it must have been on Thursday. I was just incredibly grateful to get to read it. Another wonderful gift. And what an ending!
You have nicely captured the gestures--the unspoken anguish, grief, and hope in this story. I'll add, too, that the gun was a cast off gun. And a side note: I wondered about the larger context of this story set in a world where accidents like this one surely weren't (sadly so) uncommon.
I knew this was a long comment but the hippo prevented me from warning you. Thanks for reading.
We do get a brief glimpse of father’s instinct to protect his son in the courthouse, and Berriault having him solemnly hold his hat against his chest as he leaves shows some sincerity. So, yes, with mother’s submissive awkwardness, I’m with you, a glimmer of hope for this boy. Your comments are always jam-packed-stuffed with interest, Konstantin - keep ‘em long!
I think what the story does so skillfully is avoid the language that we think might be appropriate to describe the horror. Or maybe what I'm trying to say is that it avoids describing the characters' interior. No attempt is made to describe what Arnold might be feeling - even the parents feelings are hidden in an exterior numbness or shock. The only expression of grief is that Arnold hears his mother's cries in the distance, as she discovers the body. We view this from the outside and lack of words or expression - I think that leaves the reader with almost forcing us to experience it for ourselves. We fill in what we imagine it would feel like, or what is almost impossible to imagine.
While reading the beginning of your post, I wondered whether writing a story in which you introduce a hippo and then never mention the hippo again would work. The point would not be to annoy the reader (though I'm sure it would) but to challenge her assumptions about how life proceeds. I mean, in our daily lives we depend perhaps too much on the security that we know what's coming next and on the idea that everything must happen for a purpose. But maybe that's too much of a gimmick or too contrived. Off-hand, I can't think of a piece of writing where it worked.
You make a good point about the gun going off sooner than we expected. That didn't occur to me, but I see it now. And I appreciated when you wrote, "It takes his feelings all that time to catch up to reality." I think the word that I used in my last comment, "disassociate," is not as good, because it's not as concrete and direct, as "shock." The only value of "disassociate" is the clearer sense of the mind going blank, as if separating from the physical body, and the snap of the divergence. But "shock" is less clinical and more comprehensive.
I look forward to mining this story further. By the way, FWIW, I'm not (yet, at any rate) participating here in order to improve my writing. For the time being, I'm here to learn to read more attentively and thoughtfully -- although I'm getting inspired to try a short story. For me, your method connects the head and the heart better than any literary criticism I've read, most of which leaves me cold. So, thanks for that.
Something that stood out to me about The Stone Boy in particular was its biblical echoes -- the first thing to alert me to the comparison was Arnold's nakedness, both in the opening and in the crucial moment when he knocks at his mother's door, suddenly realizing he is naked as the guilt washes over him.
The parallels aren't neat and tidy, of course, (and they shouldn't be) as the story echoes the myth of Abel and Cain too.
Perhaps someone smarter than me can make something of Berriault's use of bibilcal parallel.
I think if I can ever grasp how anyone could come up with these words in this order I'll have cracked the code of writing. I know that's foolish, but this paragraph is such a perfect representation of the horror of a terrible mistake unfolding that I want to take it apart and understand all of its tiny watch-like mechanisms:
"Arnold pressed down the bottom wire, thrust a leg through and leaned forward to bring the other leg after. His rifle caught on the wire and he jerked at it. The air was rocked by the sound of the shot. Feeling foolish, he lifted his face, baring it to an expected shower of derision from his brother. But Eugie did not turn around. Instead, from his crouching position, he fell to his knees and then pitched forward onto his face. The ducks rose up crying from the lake, cleared the mountain background and beat away northward across the pale sky."
The verbs! pressed, thrust, leaned, caught, jerked, rocked, lifted, baring, turn, crouching, fell, pitched, rose, crying, cleared, beat. HOW DOES SHE DO IT? HOW DID IT TAKE A FOURTH READING FOR ME TO REGISTER ALL OF THIS VIOLENT, EMOTIONAL ACTION IN THIS SEEMINGLY UNDERSTATED PARAGRAPH? Sorry about the caps. And that's just the verbs! I'm just sitting here pressing caps lock and exclamation points. It's so perfect I want to cry.
It's all there in front of you. She's laying out the action one step at a time. He presses down on the wire, then puts his leg through and leans forward. His rifle catches the wire and he pulls on it. The rifle goes off. He turns to see his brother's reaction, but brother had been hit. The ducks react to the sound. (I would have swapped out the ducks and the brother since the ducks would have reacted immediately, but this is more poetic.)
When you're writing, try to break down an action into logical order. That way, it flows. You don't step into a room then open the door. When you learn to start breaking down actions into the steps of that action, then you'll have a clearer idea of how to compose that part of the scene.
She's also using vivid present-tense verbs. Pressed. Thrust. Leaned. Jerked. Rocked. Pitched. Beat. Vivid verbs convey more feeling.
Those pithy Old English verbs do more work than we usually know.
Looks like you’ve cracked it already. Nouns and verbs. And choosing the right ones that convey what you mean to convey. Okay now just…..do that!
There are so many comments. I can’t read them all right now. So apologies if someone else already raised this. But did anyone else note all the references to seeing/sight/eyes/ covering eyes? Also light/dark and cold/heat. If you go through the story looking for these you can see how Berriault uses them to deepen the story in a way that is not obvious. Not too articulate today. Still buzzed after my daughter’s wedding this past weekend. People, the love in that room! I’m so filled up I gotta say I love you all!
Congratulations to your daughter (and to you)!
Thank you, George!
Congratulations! Weddings are so special, but I'm pretty old fashioned.
Are those words you noted the same as the "coaching" type words from The Incident? Seems like they could be.
Your comments make me want to read the story again..interesting observations..
And thank you for sharing your joy and love!
I love the analysis. And believe it wholeheartedly. But for me, the story extends beyond Arnold and Eugie, to family and society. The family is poor, self-sufficient, the children all have critical jobs on the farm, which most children today do not have. And the parents have allowed or encouraged, I don't know which, I'll have to reread to see if there are hints, a rather appalling hierarchy to develop between the boys. Eugie is so contemptuously (IMO, not so H, I guess) superior, he makes my teeth ache. I remember my youthful insecurity and anger at life well enough that in the moment, I was not sorry he died! And then that shocked me, because I was also not surprised that Arnold shot him. Who said, there are no accidents? Of course there are, but most are caused by inattention and carelessness. Crawling through a fence with a loaded gun is not the place for inattention or carelessness. I was and am still deeply sorry for Arnold. But that's still not the end of the story! What is this writer doing to me? Look, she says, at the end, Arnold thaws a bit and tries to ask for his mother's attention, love, understanding. her help. But she refuses. Then later, when her own feelings catch up with her, she hold out a hand to him. And he refuses it! And is, quite sensibly, frightened, I hope I'm not assuming too much to think his own reaction has frightened him.
I love how you put this: "Then later, when her own feelings catch up with her, she holds out a hand to him."
It creates a beautiful parallel between her reaction and her son's, which I hadn't considered. They both shut down in their own ways at Eugie's death, then when their feelings "catch up" with them, when they're seeking for one another, in that vulnerable moment, they each turn the other away.
And that makes me cry every time i think of it. What we do, in our weakness, to others, even when we love them.
So tragically human. To me, it's an instinct for self-protection - the lashing out, the isolating ourselves like barbed fences we build as if they could keep the pain out, when really, in the long run, they tend to hurt us more.
It's crushing. But perhaps (to end on a more hopeful note), it can teach us to see the hurt child underneath the stone men we encounter. It might teach us to be a little more forgiving and compassionate with each other.
All too real.
That wavering by the mother is so well written. She means to be hard with him. She's a hard woman I think, but a tiny maternal instinct kicks in, she weakens ever so slightly and Arnold catches it, and it's that seizing of power that frightens him I think.
For me, the biblical aspects of the story weren't so much thematic (the use of nakedness as a metaphor for shame and loss of innocence), but tonal. After the shooting and right up to meeting with the sheriff, the story pulled me into the same feeling as the Passion - where something bad has happened, and something worse is coming, and time seems to slow down and lose all dimensions, where it seems that every moment is an eternity and, despite knowing something bad is over the horizon, it seems as if the torture leading up to it will never end. Partially, I think the time of day made my mind draw a subconscious link (early morning leading into mid-morning), but mostly I think it was just how much the action did slow down - everything from that point was rendered in such specific, beautiful, torturous detail - the climb to the garden, the pea picking, the scene inside the kitchen, the hay loft, the drive to the courthouse. And then, like in the bible, when the time is finally announced, things speed up to normal time - which is almost a relief, because we are not languishing in the torture of anticipation anymore, but also a tragedy, because now the end has come and there is no hope.
The other thing that really stayed with me was how the story, with all its players, seems to focus on the fractured (beyond repair?) relationship between mother and son (and this could be a biased reading from a mother with a son, but...) - The story seems to zero in on this through its use of detail: When Arnold walks into the kitchen, it is his mother that is described first and most clearly; it his mother whose intentions he intuits ('She wanted, Arnold knew, to see his eyes'), whose reaction to Eugie's death is depicted in the most detail ('sounds sharp as knives rising from her breast') and whose rejection of Arnold comes first and most devastatingly ('No one spoke at supper, and his mother, who sat next to him, leaned her head in her hand all through the meal, curving her fingers over her eyes so as not to see him' (oh, my poor heart breaks for little Arnold)); it is his mother's voice he notices is missing when the visitors call. In fact, the conversation/interaction with his mother is the only one we see playing out in real time after Eugie dies. And I think that loss for Arnold is as keen as the loss of his brother- one that is brought into even sharper, more traumatic, detail with the ending of the story - a cow is up with her calf in the mountain, and someone needs to rescue it before the coyotes come to eat it.
And while the mother is cruel in her rejection - both at the table and in the bedroom - it's not as if she's the bad guy. It's that the story asks the impossible question - how do you love someone who has killed your child? And yet, I'm angry at her, and devastated for Arnold. How does she not see her living child - a nine year old boy - as in shock and suffering serious levels of guilt and shame and self-loathing, and needing comfort and support and love? Her question from behind the bedroom door - "Go back! Is night when you get afraid?" - I had to read that over and over to understand it. Was she saying, is it only at night you feel scared of what you have done? That the demons that should torture you during the day start to come for you? Or was she calling out his childishness, now that she doesn't see him as a child anymore? (which then resonates with the nakedness as unpardonable (for a grown up, but not a child)). Is this the moment when not only the incident, but also his mother, has robbed him of his childhood?
And there is that heartbreaking moment, when his father intervenes for him to pass the pitcher, and 'Arnold, pretending to be deaf to the discord, did not glance up, but relief rained over his shoulders at the thought that his parents recognized him again. They must have lain awake after his father had come in from the yard: had they realized together why he had come down the stairs and knocked at their door?'. (that 'relief rained over his shoulders' - the perfect response to the earlier 'he felt nothing, not grief...only the same immense silence and crawling inside of him, the way the house and fields must feel under a merciless sun') - and it seems, for a brief moment, that the relationship with his mother is not irreparable, that she does know him and see his pain and his need. And then she shatters it - she's still seeking him out, still questioning his heart - she doesn't know why he knocked, she wants him to say it now as if it is something that comes easy and can be spoken in a room full of others and not the dark comfort of her bedroom, where confessions and vulnerability are easier. She wants him to give to her, rather than offer herself (and her comfort) to him. And, I think it is that which hardens him, which turns him to the stone boy.
Through all this, I loved how Berriault treated emotions - emotions were either stated simply (he felt foolish, the same discomfort, he was afraid, a terrifying sound, etc), or they are played out in vignettes - what does grief look like? (a father alone in the silent night, a figure moving alone around the yard). what does rejection look like? (a sister refusing to pass the milk, a mother who shields her eyes so as not to see you). what does shame and guilt look like? (lying like a fugitive in a hay loft, making oneself as small as possible and denying help, comfort, kindness). Never did Berriault ask or answer what does x emotion *feel* like - there is no crying, or heart racing, or stomach twisting, or fingers trembling, or any of those trite micro emotion tells. It's either simple or sweeping in its treatment.
Final thought: there's a real sense that Berriault has spent a lot of time with this story, a lot of care has been given to it - through the repetition and resonance of symbols and words and metaphors. Knowing that all details are chosen (either consciously or unconsciously) during the drafting process or added during the revision process, I found myself wondering whether Berriault chose four ducks on the lake to reflect the number of people in Arnold's family once Eugie had died...
Wonderful work Mikhaeyla. Thank you so much for sharing this with us all.
Those four ducks out in open water reflecting the remaining family - I like that. The willows too have a whole range of associations from Celtic and native American through biblical: the Israelites hung their harps upon the willows and wept over the death of loved ones, wept over their bleak future, and their sin which resulted in God’s judgement. Forever fated to weep.
My goodness, Gina Berriault has left nothing to chance. The pay-off for draft and revision.
Would you believe it, Paul - I must have read The Stone Boy a dozen or more times over the past few days, and I never picked up the repetition of the willows! And, as you point out, it is such a clever and poignant detail - the weeping willows shielding the ducks and their view. And then, when Arnold's family return, they do not return from Eugie's dead body, or the lake, or the obnoxious blood, but from the willows.
These details and their precise selection and placement really do indicate a level of care from the author in her revision. Something to aspire to!
I’ve spent much of this time with Gina's story making drawings and paintings of moments and details which struck me or made me feel something. Naked Arnold outside the door, clambering through the fence, chickens, ducks, the willows. It’s fun to explore different ways to come by insight.
That's inspiring, Paul, mirroring the story in your own way.
Love the willows. And cottonwoods, aspen, birches, poplars. Such arboreal liveliness!
Your insights about the mother's role are so helpful, Mikhaeyla. So much here that I'll remember to come back as needed and keep this well-developed comment as a reference. That is a keen observation about the ducks! And, ooooohhhhh.... wouldn't it be an extraordinary thing to be privy to the drafts of this story in the order GB developed them?
I would *love* to see the first drafts of this story...
I love how deep you go in this commentary. Forensic literary archaeology.
Thank you, Mikhaeyla. I like the way you pointed out the sense of time slowing down and losing its dimensions, the torture that will never end. It's quite amazing how Gina achieved this. The effect of this slowing: I was riveted. The ducks seem to fly northward forever.
I can't remember who said it, but I once read that if you want to increase tension, don't speed things up, slow them down. There's obviously a balance in that (don't drag things out to their death (no pun intended!), but there is something about the agony and ecstasy of staying in a moment of lush detail and high anticipation...
I’m with David, Mikhaeyla. Quote of the day. The week! And it’s only Tuesday.
Yes. The exquisite torment, that you cannot look away from. I love the way you put that.
Beautiful… Thank you!
Pardon me if I'm repeating someone else's insight, as I didn't read all of the comments (so many excellent points and subtle nuances you've all pointed out!)... I really appreciate the shorthand Berriault uses in the scene where Arnold knocks on his mother's door. I think she uses the metaphor of the nakedness in the Garden of Eden to express the moment when Arnold fully realizes the gravity of the accident. Before, he may have believed it was an accident and if he just ducked low and hid out, didn't get in anyone's way, maybe they could all move on. But when his mother admonishes him for his fear, "Is night when you get afraid?" -- instead of when he shot his brother -- "Arnold was aware suddenly that he was naked.......and his nakedness had become unpardonable." Unpardonable to his mother, maybe to himself as well. His awareness of his nakedness is the awareness of what he's done and what the rest of his life holds.His shame is like that of Adam and Eve's after they ate the fruit. As the reader, that's where I see what Arnold's future will be like, especially between him and his mother, and for as long as he lives in that house. She will never forgive him. It's masterful how much Berriault makes the reader understand in that one small scene.
Arnold is not the only one in shock. The mother is, the family is. A rural, taciturn family. Many comments are hard on the mother, and the parents. As the author tells the story, she does not know who is behind the door. A small naked boy who does not speak. The family begins to shift and come together again in the story, so slightly, but the boy is scarred for life. But they all are. No mothering will change that. The small milk jug gesture of the father that rights his sister's reaction. For me the pivotal bits were the outsiders, their arrival, the sheriff's 'restless blue eyes'. The story they impose on Arnold, about his coldness when he doesn't act like they think he should. They take over Arnold's narrative for the community.
I was stunned by how accurately Berriault evoked real trauma. I don't know guns and didn't care if I didn't understand how the gun fired, I was with her. For me Arnold was at a stage in his life, 9-10 yrs old, where he is leaving the shelter of his childhood and entering into his adolescence, his shift into the outside world. That's where Berriault leaves us.
Thank you, Joyce, your perspective resonated. It’s brilliant how Berriault is able to depict the traumatized and confused agony of so many characters in the multiplicity of their individuality. And that age is such an important, transformational one, to turn to stone.
This does seem like the pivotal moment in the story, and in Arnold's life.