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.
Feb 21, 2022·edited Feb 21, 2022Liked by George Saunders
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.
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.
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!
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.
The most frustrating thing about the book of Genesis is the lack of comment or interiority. A story like that of Cain and Abel is difficult in part because we don't ever quite understand why things are happening--God shows clear favor to Abel but we don't understand why, which leaves Cain strangely sympathetic, despite the fact he's the one to be punished. The story doesn't explain why things happen the way they do, or how the characters feel, or what we're meant to understand about the nature of God. We fill in these gaps for ourselves.
I felt something very similar reading "The Stone Boy," and I'm not surprised by the impulse to describe it as Biblical. There are big gaps in this story, and a lack of a certain kind of interiority that I think we're too quick to paper over by saying that Arnold is in a state of traumatized shock and therefore has little to share about his own motivations.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The most frustrating thing about the book of Genesis is the lack of comment or interiority. A story like that of Cain and Abel is difficult in part because we don't ever quite understand why things are happening--God shows clear favor to Abel but we don't understand why, which leaves Cain strangely sympathetic, despite the fact he's the one to be punished. The story doesn't explain why things happen the way they do, or how the characters feel, or what we're meant to understand about the nature of God. We fill in these gaps for ourselves.
I felt something very similar reading "The Stone Boy," and I'm not surprised by the impulse to describe it as Biblical. There are big gaps in this story, and a lack of a certain kind of interiority that I think we're too quick to paper over by saying that Arnold is in a state of traumatized shock and therefore has little to share about his own motivations.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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.