Bag of Bones

“You don’t expect to have to bury your wife when you’re thirty-six and she herself is two years younger. Death was the last thing on our minds.”

In this passage, Mike talks about the unexpected nature of Jo’s death, stressing their age as indicators of how much longer he expected Jo would live. Ironically, Mike discovers that the latter part of the passage is untrue, as it is revealed that Jo was deep into the history of The Cyclical Nature of Trauma and Violence at Dark Score Lake when she died. In this way, the passage quietly foreshadows the twist of Jo’s secret life.

“It’s not a question of love or affection. I can give those and I can take them. I feel pain like anyone else. I need to touch and be touched. But if someone asks me, ‘Are you all right?’ I can’t answer no. I can’t say help me.”

Mike characterizes himself as someone who isn’t inclined to ask others for help. This hints at the isolation he experiences during the four years after Jo’s death. It also sets up his connection with Mattie later on, since she becomes the first person that he is willing to be vulnerable around and to open up to about his writer’s block.

“According to gloomy old Dennison Carville, the aspiring novelist should understand from the outset that fiction’s goals were forever beyond his reach, that the job was an exercise in futility. ‘Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there,’ Hardy supposedly said, ‘the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.’ I understood because that was what I felt like in those interminable, dissembling days: a bag of bones.”

Early on in the novel, Mike explains the novel’s title by citing an apocryphal quote from English author Thomas Hardy and suggesting that he feels like the “bag of bones” that Hardy speaks of. Following the death of Jo, whose validation engendered Mike’s creative abilities, Mike no longer believes in his writing and struggles with Overcoming a Fear of the Future.