The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

Much of the initial critical reaction to The Story of Edgar Sawtelle centered on the book’s upcycling of the familiar elements of Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, a response encouraged by author David Wroblewski’s acknowledgment of his debt to the story of a son tormented over what to do about his father’s murder. However, the character of Edgar Sawtelle is far more influenced by the message of his favorite book, The Jungle Book. The Jungle Book is a collection of stories by Nobelist Rudyard Kipling about the young orphan Mowgli, a child or “man-cub,” raised in the jungles of Africa by a family of wolves. Edgar struggles to understand his uncle’s violent behavior and his ruthless disregard for animals—most notably the kennel’s pups but also the wild animals that roam the woods that ring the farm. Edgar uses passages from Kipling’s book that examine the tension between civilization and the wild to understand the dimension of his uncle’s threat. Although Kipling’s book is now seen by some as a racially problematic allegory about British imperialism, taken at face value The Jungle Book resonates with Edgar’s story arc.

Kipling explores how, despite teeming with wild animals, it is humanity itself that brings chaos and death into the jungle world. Left to its own devices, nature adapts a reassuring symmetry, a balance of life and death in which no species attacks, much less kills another animal, save to preserve its own security. That balance provides Kipling’s novel with its sense of rightness, which is upended by the intrusion of humans with their hunger for ownership. Humans’ willingness to use violence to secure an advantage, and their blind allegiance to their own selfish needs, is the code of conduct that Uncle Claude follows. When Edgar watches in disbelief and horror as his uncle dispassionately shoots a deer, he begins to see his uncle as a conscience-less menace who, to borrow from the lengthy Kipling passage that Edgar reads, has “let Death loose in the Jungle” (282).

In reimagining the jungle world of wolves and tigers as a balanced environment of order, Kipling provides young Edgar with a template for the world of the kennel before the arrival of Uncle Claude. Certainly, there is menace lurking just beyond the borders of the kennel’s elaborate fencing. That is the world into which Edgar and his yearling pups head after the death of Dr. Papineau. It is a Darwinian world of competitive survival in which Edgar feels vulnerable and exposed. But that menace, as Edgar discovers, is carefully balanced and in its own way logical, unlike the world of menace created by the amorality of his uncle. In affirming the rightness of the animal world and the violation of the rightness by amoral humanity, Kipling provides Edgar with a way to understand what so profoundly confuses him—that is, how can the tidy world of his father’s farm, sustained by temperance, courage, logic, and compassion, be so utterly lost with the arrival of a single terrifying human. 

In a novel that is just under 600 pages, the principal character only says three words. As he is about to succumb to the flames and the poison, Edgar smiles and whispers to the ghostly image of his father, “I love you” (552), bringing out for the first time in his 14 years the voice that he long carried inside him. The author characterizes the moment as Edgar finally being able to say “what he meant to say all along” (552).

For most of the novel, Edgar, born with a speech disability, communicates through sign language, some of which he learns through the patience and dedication of his parents, the rest he invents in an individually stylized language. The novel underscores Edgar’s mutism by never using quotation marks around Edgar’s communications. His last three words are the only time his words appear in quotation marks. The novel thus underscores the sign language that defines Edgar’s communication.

Using a disability as a symbol is a risk. A novelist, particularly one who does not have mutism himself, can seem exploitative or insensitive. But here, Edgar’s decision to communicate in his own way symbolizes an important counterargument to the novel’s larger sense of secrecy. Sign language emerges as a symbol of honesty, communication, and connection.

Edgar wants to communicate. Unable to make most sounds, he demands to be heard and to make clear his complex emotional thoughts. With his parents, Edgar can use sign language. In the scenes with Gar, for instance, after the tornado damages the barn or when his father offers his son the chance to raise a litter on his own, Edgar signs his ideas. In his encounter with Henry Lamb, Edgar writes what he needs to convey. In this, the novel parallels Edgar’s heroic struggle to communicate even with Almondine. Through her thoughts, readers see that Almondine understands much more about the Sawtelle family than they credit her with. But like young Edgar she lacks the ability to speak those insights. The least insightful characters, the villains in the novel, speak with a charming eloquence; the most insightful, the heroes in the novel, speak, if at all, through sign language. 

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle symbolically uses the forbidding forest of Chequamegon, a real place in northern Wisconsin, as the place of shadows and fears, where the young hero goes as part of the transition from the comfort and reassurances of childhood to the complex adult world.

After he accidentally kills Dr. Papineau, and at the urging of his mother, Edgar departs the farm for the woods to evade law enforcement. With only his three yearling pups for company and consolation, Edgar heads into the “dark Chequamegon” (328). Gone in a shattering moment are all the reassuring elements of his childhood. He leaves after confronting a part of himself he never recognized before. The woods, pathless and unfamiliar, provide the symbolic setting for Edgar’s contemplations of his new identity. Much as Hamlet exiles himself to England after he stabs Polonius, Edgar struggles to find himself in the pathless woods of Chequamegon.

Appropriately for a landscape that symbolizes the contradictory world of good and evil, the woods are “shadow upon shadow” (332), lighted only by fireflies at night and filtered sunlight during the day. Any path quickly “fizzles out” (333). Edgar must rely on his own navigating instincts. He wants to get to Canada. “Whenever he was forced to navigate around any obstacle, he chose what he thought was the northernmost route” (334). The nadir of his time in the woods comes when he must rely on the help of the kind stranger whose home he just robbed. Edgar has never known himself like this—hungry, desperate, criminal, and deeply confused.

The forest of Chequamegon ultimately symbolizes Edgar’s rebirth. With the grievous injury to his dog, Edgar prepares to depart the forest. But like Hamlet returning from England, or like Simba returning to Pride Lands, Edgar returns to the Sawtelle farm different; he is more informed of his own identity, more confident in what has to be done to avenge the murder of his father, and more at peace with a grey world of moral complexity. As he walks toward the fence marking his family property, Edgar steps out of the “mantle of tree shadows” (466), ready to engage the world that had so overwhelmed him before his journey into the darkness of the woods.