Signs and Symbols

The father is the story’s secondary protagonist. He is a dynamic character that goes through a positive emotional transition over the course of the narrative. Like the mother, the father’s real name is never revealed. This anonymity allows him to serve as the archetype of a father trying to protect his family. While he faces many of the same challenges as the mother—poverty and estrangement from American society—the father also suffers the humiliation of having to rely on his brother Isaac for money, despite his history as a “fairly successful businessman” (Paragraph 2) back in Europe.

Whereas the mother is defined by her steadfast attitude toward their shared hardships, the father’s emotions change significantly over the course of their day. He is at first clearly upset by his inability to visit his son or give him his birthday present. He is quiet and brooding, beaten down by his family’s many difficulties. The description of the father’s physical ailments—his veiny hands, “horrible, mask-like grimace,” stomach aches, and “uncomfortable dental plate” (Paragraph 9)—highlight the theme of Death, Life, and In Between, positioning him as hovering between life and death.

The father’s outlook shifts when he seizes on the plan to bring his son home from the psychiatric hospital. With many aspects of his life out of his control, he embraces the idea that he can contribute to his son’s recovery. The story ends with the father still in the midst of this uplifted mood, as he reexamines the fruit jellies with renewed hope for the future. However, the father’s optimism may be fleeting. Given the seriousness of the son’s condition and the family’s many other difficulties, his dream of bringing the son home may be naïve.

While he never directly appears in the story, the son is central to the motivations of the mother and father and drives the action forward. His psychiatric condition and confinement in the “sanitarium” (Paragraph 3) are the source of his parents’ anxiety and the reason for the journey that makes up the first part of the narrative. Though he isn’t hostile to his parents, in some ways he serves as the story’s antagonist, since he represents the major challenge that the mother and father struggle to overcome.

Rather than his physical appearance or attributes, the story characterizes the son through the specifics of his condition, called “referential mania,” which he appears to have developed at least partially as a reaction to the hardships he endured as a child. The story discusses this mania at length, using evocative metaphors and imagery to describe the son’s self-absorption and belief that all aspects of the world reflect his own thoughts and personality. Like his parents, the son doesn’t receive an actual name, allowing him to stand in for children more generally. In this capacity, the narrative invites the reader to share the son’s perspective, and even his mental state, viewing everything in the story as a cipher that they must unriddle.

The son occupies a liminal position in the narrative. He is always just offscreen, hidden behind the hospital nurse, or viewed through childhood photos, rather than arriving in the flesh. Similarly, his suicide attempts and psychiatric condition put him somewhere between life and death, partway along the spectrum of Death, Life, and In Between. The story’s ending underlines his ambiguous position, leaving unanswered whether the final telephone call confirms his death, his escape, or neither.