“Made for better things”

“Made for better things” is the phrase the narrator uses to gather a group of academics’ disappointed ambitions into a single, bitterly ironic idea. In a dark patch of woods on his walk back from Tony Coniglia’s house, he considers how he and his colleagues once imagined lives beyond West Central Pennsylvania University in Railton—and how, over time, the conviction that they deserved more has become a way of avoiding responsibility for what they did not pursue.

The phrase and its setting

The thought comes after the narrator leaves Tony Coniglia and Missy Blaylock. He has retrieved his clothes, put a Polaroid Missy gave him in his pocket, and begun the roughly ten-block walk downhill toward his car. Halfway there, he stops in the woods to urinate. The pause gives his thoughts room to turn from the encounter with Missy to the professional and personal dissatisfaction shared by people around him.

Missy’s complaint that her breasts are wasted in a small media market like Railton initially strikes him as funny; in the woods, it seems sadder. He sees her remark as a compact version of the predicament facing Jacob Rose, Gracie DuBois, Paul Rourke, Teddy Barnes, June Barnes, and perhaps himself. Their shared conviction that they were “made for better things” links a passing joke about a small market to a larger sense of lives narrowed by circumstance and choice.

Ambition and missed opportunities

The narrator imagines that, twenty years earlier, the group would have laughed at the suggestion that they would spend their academic careers at West Central Pennsylvania University. The present has removed the humor from that imagined future. They now face the prospect of growing old together, repeatedly seeing in one another reminders of the opportunities they did not take.

The examples are specific. Finny could have finished his dissertation but did not. More than a dozen years earlier, June Barnes received a job offer from a decent university on the strength of a well-placed article. Teddy Barnes had just received tenure, however, and the prospective employer would not take him as part of a package deal, so June’s opportunity did not become a move. Later, Teddy had a chance to enter administration—an opportunity the narrator judges would have benefited both Teddy and his students—but June talked him out of it, perhaps out of revenge. Even Gracie DuBois’s poetry once showed promise. These separate unrealized paths give the phrase its substance: the group’s sense of lost potential rests on identifiable choices and foregone chances, not simply on an abstract belief that life should have been grander.

Self-reproach beneath the resentment

The narrator identifies the forces that occupied the years they had not meant to lose: committee work, departmental politics, daily lesson plans, and what he regards as students’ increasingly militant ignorance. Yet his account does not let those pressures serve as a complete excuse. In middle age, the group has chosen to be angry with one another rather than with themselves, and has avoided facing the possibility that being suited for more would have required actually doing more.

The phrase therefore shifts from a consoling story about thwarted promise into a measure of self-deception. Their resentment preserves the image of what they might have been while deflecting the harder question of why they did not become it. The narrator sets this collective bitterness against Tony Coniglia, whom he considers one of the few contented men he knows. Tony, in the narrator’s rueful imagining, is enjoying Missy’s attention rather than wondering whether it reflects affection or her desire for a more upscale market. The contrast sharpens the passage’s irony: the narrator can diagnose the group’s habit of converting disappointment into grievance even as he remains caught inside its regrets.