alligator

The alligator enters Charlie Decker's narrative not as a living creature but as a simile for the texture of death and the coldness of human flesh in extremis. After the shooting of Mrs. Underwood, as Charlie sits behind her desk and the class settles into a stunned silence, he notices that her body is beginning to stiffen with rigor mortis. The thought that her skin "probably felt like an alligator handbag" crosses his mind, a visceral, almost offhand comparison that links the dead teacher to a processed, commodified object—something once alive now reduced to a cold, inert accessory. This image recurs almost immediately when Charlie, still holding the pistol by the barrel and realizing no one has tried to escape, thinks of touching Ted Jones and imagines that his skin would feel "like an alligator handbag" . The repetition of the same simile for two very different bodies—one dead, one alive but filled with hate—suggests a flattening of human warmth into a uniform, reptilian coldness that Charlie perceives in the world around him. The alligator handbag becomes a symbol of emotional and physical deadness, a texture of horror that Charlie projects onto both his victim and his antagonist.

The Shark and the Alligator: Predatory Imagery

The alligator simile belongs to a broader pattern of predatory animal imagery that Charlie uses to describe the adults who threaten him. Earlier in the morning, before the shooting, Charlie watches Mrs. Underwood smile at a student and thinks it "reminded me of the shark in Jaws" . The shark is a predator of the deep, sudden and lethal; the alligator, by contrast, is a creature of the swamp, patient and cold-blooded. Together, they frame the authority figures in Charlie's life as dangerous, inhuman predators. The alligator handbag, however, is a dead predator—its danger has been neutralized, its skin turned into a luxury item. This shift from living predator to dead commodity mirrors Charlie's own trajectory: he begins the day feeling hunted by Mrs. Underwood's shark-like smile, but by the time he imagines her skin as an alligator handbag, he has become the hunter who has reduced her to an object. The simile thus carries a double edge: it expresses Charlie's horror at the coldness of death, but also his own complicity in that coldness.

The Squirrel as Counterpoint

Charlie's observation of the squirrel on the lawn provides a stark contrast to the alligator imagery. The squirrel is alive, active, and free—running through the grass, tail bushed out, black eyes shining "bright as buckshot" . It is a creature of the present moment, unburdened by the past or the future. Charlie watches it as a way to escape the tension of Mrs. Underwood's class, and its presence seems to ground him. When he is called to the office, the squirrel is "still scampering" , indifferent to the human drama unfolding. Later, after the shooting, Charlie looks for the squirrel through the window and notes that it is gone: "Squirrels make lousy innocent bystanders" . The squirrel's disappearance marks the point of no return—the moment when the natural, innocent world withdraws, leaving only the cold, dead world of the alligator handbag. The contrast between the living squirrel and the dead alligator skin encapsulates the novel's central tension between vitality and numbness, freedom and entrapment.