September 11 attacks

In the narrator's fractured domestic world, the September 11 attacks surface not as a historical event but as a startling simile: when the baby burns his hands on the embers, the father reacts the way George W. Bush did upon hearing about the Twin Towers. This comparison collapses the catastrophic and the mundane, exposing the narrator's alienation and the family's failure to respond to crisis.

The Simile in Context

The reference appears in a scene of domestic negligence and emotional detachment. The narrator, standing outside the house with her face glued to the glass, watches her husband and son through the recently repaired sliding door. The baby, left by the fire, crawls toward the fireplace and sticks his hands into the embers. The father's reaction is described as being like Bush's when he heard about the Twin Towers—a moment of frozen, inadequate response. The simile is deliberately incongruous: a national tragedy is reduced to the level of a household accident, while a household accident is inflated to the scale of a national catastrophe. This rhetorical move is characteristic of the narrator's darkly comic, ironic voice, which consistently refuses to distinguish between the serious and the absurd.

The Father's Incompetence

The simile underscores the father's paralysis and incompetence. He runs off to look for bandages and anti-inflammatory pills, his towel dropping from his waist, unsure how to calm the child. The baby, rather than screaming or crying, shatters the silence with a kind of snarl—an animalistic response that aligns with the novel's recurring theme of animality. The father applies TCP to the child's palms and the soles of his feet, a clumsy and inadequate treatment. The narrator observes that the child's blood looks like foam, and that he is "from outer space," a phrase that distances the child from ordinary humanity. The father's reaction, like Bush's, is one of shock and ineffective action, highlighting his failure as a caregiver and his emotional unavailability.

The Narrator's Alienation

The September 11 reference also illuminates the narrator's own position. She stands outside, watching through the glass, and describes herself as a stranger, an outsider: she doesn't know how to speak without causing offence, she spies on people's homes, and she hasn't showered in days. She deliberately does not go in to help, even as the baby burns himself. Her detachment is both a symptom of her mental state and a form of protest against the "normal family" she is supposed to inhabit. The simile thus serves a double function: it mocks the father's inadequacy, but it also reveals the narrator's own refusal to participate in the scene of care. She is not a witness to the September 11 attacks, but she is a witness to her own family's disaster, and she chooses to remain outside, watching.

The Stag's Golden Eye

The passage concludes with the narrator's only source of salvation: the stag's golden eye, still staring at her. This image, which recurs throughout the novel, represents a form of connection that transcends human relationships. The narrator explicitly states that what saves her "tonight, and every other night, has nothing to do with my husband's love or my son's." The stag, a wild animal that appears at nightfall between the woods and the garden, offers a gaze that is both terrifying and sustaining. The September 11 simile, with its reference to a world-historical catastrophe, is thus placed in stark contrast to the narrator's private mythology. The attacks are a distant, abstract event, while the stag's eye is an immediate, intimate presence. The narrator's world is not shaped by global politics but by the animal and the elemental, and it is this that she clings to in the face of domestic chaos.

Thematic Significance

The September 11 reference is a key example of the novel's use of incongruous comparison to critique the banality of family life. The narrator repeatedly draws on catastrophic imagery—the Holocaust, the September 11 attacks, the death of a child—to describe her own experiences, thereby questioning the boundaries between private and public trauma. The simile also reflects the novel's broader concern with the failure of language: the narrator cannot articulate her own suffering directly, so she borrows the vocabulary of historical disaster. Yet this borrowing is ironic, for it suggests that her suffering is both more and less than a national tragedy. The September 11 attacks, in this context, become a measure of the narrator's alienation—a reference point that is at once too large and too small for her own pain.