These Silent Woods

Cooper is both the protagonist and the first-person narrator of These Silent Woods. Although the first four chapters do not explicitly discuss his wartime experience, subsequent PTSD, or the circumstances that led him to bring Finch to the woods, they nonetheless bear the marks of all of those situations. Scotland in particular provokes Cooper’s paranoia. When they first meet, Cooper tries to talk himself out of his responses, telling himself that he shouldn’t be paranoid. At the same time, he considers shooting Scotland, almost without thinking twice: “He’d been watching us. Keeping track. I thought again of the Ruger. Disturbed by the fact that the idea of killing him swam to me so easily, that it felt like a natural solution” (17). Cooper shows himself to be aware of the unreliability of his mind—and, to some extent, of the unreliability of his narrative more generally—and demonstrates an ability, albeit limited, to control his actions. The language of the novel frequently bears the mark of this struggle. Cooper’s sentences are often fragmentary, producing a staccato rhythm that suggests a barrage of unconnected impressions—or the sound of a machine gun’s firing.

Even in situations that are less extreme than meeting a stranger with an AK-47 in the woods, Cooper’s mind does not always work in a linear way. At the very beginning of Chapter 1, for instance, he observes: “Outside, still dark, the sun up but not coming, the woods gray and the trees, looming in shapes: dark sentinels, soldiers. All these years and still everything always comes back to that. War” (2). Absent are the sorts of connecting words that more conventional grammar requires; Cooper’s perceptions, on the other hand, are stripped-down and suggest a mind used to working quickly to avoid danger. At the same time, however, he possesses a meta-awareness of his perceptions. The trees seem like soldiers, but he knows they aren’t. More than that, he knows why his mind always goes there first, even though the details won’t be revealed until later. The single word, “War,” functions as a shorthand for the causes of his unreliability.

The first-person narration also helps build suspense in this psychological thriller. In his interactions with Finch and, to a certain extent, Scotland, Cooper is keenly aware of all the things he isn’t saying and everything he does not feel comfortable revealing. Yet he does reveal much more in his narration, implicating a reader in his work of concealment, even before the extent of that concealment becomes clear. Even without the additional burden of fighting his PTSD, the effort of remembering what to say and what not to say puts pressure on the narrative itself, foreshadowing Cooper’s eventual failure to maintain control over his and Finch’s reality. The mental load that Cooper carries reflects The Inescapability of the Past, something that will become a central theme in the novel. Finch’s memorized explanation for their isolation—“Because you did something you shouldn’t have, once. To keep the two of us together” (30)—functions as a seal on all those past experiences; even before those experiences are made explicit, though, it is clear that the explanation will not satisfy her for much longer.

Cooper’s attempt to flee his past is further belied by the narration itself. As much as Cooper tries to remain in the relative simplicity of the present moment, framed by the woods, the cabin, himself, and Finch, the past always keeps interrupting the story. When he talks with Finch in general terms about who they are and why they live the way they do, the circumstances that led there are never far from his mind. The visit from Scotland in the present moment of the narration sparks a longer series of reflections on the first time they saw each other. The thought of leaving the woods and going to Walmart evokes Cooper’s previous trip, more than five years earlier, and the terror of returning home to see Scotland on his porch with Finch in his arms. Cindy, his late partner and Finch’s mother, is omnipresent, both in Cooper’s memories and dreams and in the appearance of their daughter.

All of these circumstances contribute to the mood of fear and uncertainty that pervades the text. The death of the hen Susanna takes on a sinister cast, making the natural world appear untrustworthy. When the eminently trustworthy Jake fails to make his annual visit, something more profound begins to threaten  Cooper and Finch’s existence. Scotland, though he is also a military veteran and thus marginally more trustworthy in Cooper’s eyes than he would be otherwise, is a poor replacement for the reliable Jake. Cooper feels vulnerable under Scotland’s gaze, a dynamic that has been in play—at least in Cooper’s account—since their first meeting, when Scotland gave him a rabbit for a much-needed meal, but also left newspapers with all the coverage of Cooper’s crime. The duality of Cooper and Scotland’s relationship—again, to the extent that Cooper understands it—makes it difficult for Cooper to accept his neighbor’s help, let alone the friendship he has with Finch. Yet Cooper is aware of Finch’s growing yearning, The Desire for Connection in the Midst of Isolation, another important theme—and source of intense conflict throughout the novel. Finch’s extensive reading in 19th-century American literature—a legacy of Jake’s father, who once owned the cabin—has made her aware of the broader world beyond the woods, as well as of the strangeness of her situation. She does not buy Cooper’s claim that reading about something in a book is just as good as experiencing it; Cooper does not seem to hold this view with any conviction either.

Still, another one of the consequences that Cooper faces because he is trying to escape his past is a certain distance from Finch. Because of everything he feels he has to hide, he cannot be fully authentic with her, nor can he alleviate her desire to connect with other people. When Finch expresses her grief over Jake’s death, Cooper interrupts to remind her that they don’t know for sure that Jake is dead; Scotland, on the other hand, offers sympathy: “It’s terrible to lose someone you love, terrible. Makes you hurt in ways you didn’t know you could hurt” (35). His tenderness and “unexpected wisdom” is disconcerting to Cooper, but he is powerless to prevent it. Cooper’s dream, in which he sees his deceased wife walking away with Scotland, who “turned back and grinned and waved and his hand was covered in blood” (21), suggests the extent of conflicting feelings.

The death of Susanna the hen foreshadows the theme of The Ambiguity of Right and Wrong. Finch is initially disappointed with her father for having killed Susanna rather than trying to save her; she had not seen how badly Susanna had been hurt by the raccoon. However, even this context fails to convince Finch that her father acted appropriately, leading him to tell her that right and wrong are not always entirely separate from one another. The “ethics of the woods” dictate that killing for the sake of killing is wrong (4), but that killing to end suffering is acceptable. To himself, Cooper acknowledges that he and Finch live in “a small and insulated world [with] a simplicity to it that makes it difficult to explain the complexities of life” (8-9). As a compromise with the situation, he allows Finch to hold a burial service for Susanna (rather than eating her, as Cooper would prefer).