Ironweed

However sane Francis appears on most counts, it’s clear that the ghosts of his past haunt him in a very real way: at one point, he explicitly asks himself “What if nobody sees these bozos but me?” (52); on other occasions, his conversations with these phantoms ends as Rudy responds to something Francis says (apparently out loud) to the ghost. Each ghost constitutes a link between past and present and serves as a catalyst for Francis to reconsider his actions, good or bad. As their numbers mount, so too does Francis’s anguish, which finally reaches a breaking point as the ghosts are constructing bleachers in Annie’s yard, at which point Francis realizes that he has allowed the unreal and the insubstantial to take priority over the real, a mistake he vows to rectify.

Later, Francis witnesses a kind of ghostly representation of the women he has known, which moves him to address not his remorse for his violence, as the earlier apparitions did, but to consider the good things he missed out on doing; notably, Sandra’s ghost testifies to the others of the kindness he extended to her before she died. In the end, the tables are turned when Peggy compares Francis to a ghost come back to haunt his family; his absence has turned him into the very thing he detests.