Understanding James Leo Herlihy by Ward Robert;

Author:Ward, Robert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press

In the surrounding trees of this vast orchard, perched high on all the naked limbs, were tens of thousands of people, all children, and all singing. All of the people he knew or had ever known were in the branches and he recognized them, even Annabel and Ralph, but now they were child people. Each person, of these tens of thousands, sang his individual song, each one separate, different; and it was impossible to make out the words or melodies. Heard from so great a height, all of them together made one sound that was like the wind. But then the wind itself came along, and it made no sound at all. It crept in from all sides, invisible and silent. Clinton knew there was no way to warn anyone of the approach of a menace that could be neither seen nor heard; therefore he had no choice but to witness whatever might take place. So the wind blew, and it blew with such force that all the branches of all the trees, even the highest ones, began to shake so violently that all of the tiny singers were blown away. The branches were bare and silent again and there were no children left in the world. (213–14)

Like Holden Caulfield’s dream of trying to catch children falling over a cliff, Clinton’s has witnessed a prophetic vision of the inevitability of adulthood. The “solution,” though, does not lie in just that but also in the existential recognition that each person is an individual responsible for his own path in life and the garden he keeps. Once he recognizes that, he can feel the release of a deep emotional outpouring that signals his passage to manhood.

During Clinton’s dream Berry-Berry also has a moment of revelation. As he wakes up and sees his brother with a gun, he realizes the terrible truth of the situation. This forces Berry-Berry to experience a raft of various emotions, including self-hatred, emptiness, and an acknowledgment of his deep love for his brother. Bending down to touch his brother’s skin, “he knew instantly, and in a way that he had never known before, that there is life in other people than himself, blood and spirit, vulnerability, a heartbeat, a pulse.” The painful lesson is finally learned, but it is too late to recapture love for his kid brother because, as he notices, Clinton had turned into “a mysterious giant possessed of powers that he had little hope of attaining” (216, 217).

Arthur Miller argued that there is a great optimism in literary tragedy because it teaches an important lesson to those who are left alive after the death of the hero. His most famous protagonist, Willy Loman, is elevated to a tragic status because his son, Biff, who saw his father as “a dime a dozen,” comes to see him as “a prince.”6 Similarly, Clinton, who originally thought of Echo as a middle-aged virgin, eventually recognizes her as a “royal figure” (200). While Willy’s death shows the Loman family

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