The Burgess Boys

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and racism.

The object that Zach throws into the mosque is meaningful in several ways. Pigs are regarded as unclean by Islamic religious law, and the presence of the pig’s head taints the mosque in a symbolic manner. The act is regarded by many as a hate crime because it is interpreted as a kind of taunting or ridiculing of the Muslim community by a white person. Zach insists that he did not mean for the act to be interpreted as an act of religious or ethnic hate and that he took the pig’s head merely because he thought it would make a scary Halloween decoration, but his choice to throw it into a mosque makes clear that he knew it would have particular significance in that setting, even if he did not understand the seriousness of his actions.

As the novel unfolds and Jim and Bob are able to converse with Zach, Zach reveals his father’s clear racist sentiments against the Somalis. Both grow to suspect that Zach’s action was not so much an expression of his own personal hatred of the Somalis as an attempt to emulate his father to obtain his father’s attention.