praying mantis

The praying mantis is a potent, recurring image in Charles Decker's narration, used to capture the alien, predatory, and insectile quality he perceives in the adult world, especially during the traumatic hunting trip of his childhood. The image first crystallizes in Chapter 5, when nine-year-old Charlie, awakened by a nightmare and needing to urinate, overhears his father Carl Decker and his friends—Al Lathrop, Scotty Norwiss, Randy Earl, and guide Hubie Levesque—drinking and talking around a campfire in the Allagash. Trapped in his tent, Charlie watches their shadows cast on the canvas by the firelight. The elongated, bobbing shadow-heads do not look human to him; they appear as "a bunch of talking praying mantises," their movements filled with "insectile glee." This transformation of familiar men into monstrous, alien insects captures the child's profound fear and estrangement, reducing the drunken, threatening adults to something inhuman and predatory. The image recurs later in the same chapter when Charlie, having finally emerged from the tent, is confronted by the dark, firelit woods and the drunk men. He recalls the "shadows like praying mantises" as part of the overwhelming sensory assault of fear, firelight, and the memory of his mother's bed, reinforcing the connection between the insect and a world of adult menace from which he feels utterly alienated. The praying mantis thus functions as a symbol of the dehumanizing, predatory nature of the masculine authority figures who populate Charlie's most traumatic memory, an image of cold, insectile violence that prefigures the rage he will later unleash.