Burke Devore’s Despair

Burke Devore’s despair is the mounting pressure of unemployment, dwindling family security, and a job market in which experience cannot guarantee even an interview. It becomes more than discouragement: Burke recasts competition as a threat to his family’s survival and, ultimately, treats murder as a means of getting work. Yet the promised relief never arrives when he expects it, leaving his desperation unresolved and his willingness to continue intact.

Identity and Material Pressure

Burke’s crisis begins with the loss of his position at Halcyon Mills and the long search for another managerial job in the paper industry. He considers himself broadly qualified: he knows paper and believes he could take over almost any managerial role in the industry after minimal training in a specialty. What defeats that confidence is not, in his view, a lack of general competence, but an employer’s ability to choose from a surplus of applicants who already know the precise function required and will accept lower pay and fewer benefits.

His applications bring mostly silence. He studies job advertisements and sends out résumés, but receives no answers to the questions that silence leaves hanging: whether his salary request is too high, whether he phrased something badly, or whether he omitted something important. He presents his résumé as simple and truthful, without disguising his age or boasting about his qualifications, and includes his college interests to suggest that he is well-rounded. The careful self-presentation changes nothing. For Burke, the absence of a response becomes part of a larger proof that effort and ability cannot secure a fair hearing.

The consequences are immediate and domestic. He and Marjorie Devore are running out of money as well as time; he is not prepared to invent a product or start a paper mill with almost no capital, and sees paid employment as necessary. He measures the danger in the mortgage, household expenses, and the cost of supporting his children, including one already in college and Billy, who is nearing high-school graduation. His despair therefore attaches not only to status or professional identity, but to his ability to provide for the life his family has built.

A Competition Without a Fair Measure

Burke believes that even a candidate with the right experience, capacity, and willingness may never be an employer’s first choice. When several applicants are comparably qualified, he sees the decisive factors as personal nuances: amiability, a voice, a smile, shared interest in a sport, or an interviewer’s opinion of a necktie. There will always be someone marginally closer to an imagined ideal, he concludes, and employers have no reason to settle for second best. His fear is not simply that he may lose one position, but that he will remain permanently behind in a system offering too few jobs to too many capable people.

A counselor’s story about unemployed aerospace engineers gives Burke a hard-edged account of the rules of that system. The engineers lose potential investment after saying that their first use of the money would be to pay back wages. The lesson offered to the unemployed workers is that “Nobody invited you. Nobody owes you a thing.” A job and a middle-class life are described as prizes to fight for, not entitlements. Burke takes that lesson to heart, perhaps further than the counselor intended. It turns the vulnerability he feels into a competitive doctrine: the employer does not need him; he needs the employer.

That doctrine also strips away the consoling idea of solidarity among workers. Later, Burke tells Longus Quinlan that during the final months at Halcyon Mills, colleagues who had once been close became competitors. People who used to eat lunch together stopped doing so; when someone asked whether there were job leads, others concealed information, even by lying. Burke describes friendships and relationships ending as the former group stopped looking out for one another. In his account, the workplace community did not merely disperse after the layoffs: it became a tribe in which each person’s chance depended on beating the others.

From Fear to Violent Reasoning

Burke’s first thought of killing a competitor arrives as a daydream about Upton “Ralph” Fallon, whom he sees as standing between himself and safety. He initially treats the thought as hyperbole, then wonders whether he means it. His reasoning draws together the household’s declining finances, the likelihood that things will grow worse, and the costs of raising his children. He imagines killing Fallon as self-defense—not only defense of his family, but of his mortgage, future, and own life. By presenting a rival as an obstacle to survival, Burke gives a violent impulse the language of necessity.

The idea gains force because Burke regards ordinary employment as the only practical route back to security. He believes he cannot create a new business for himself and cannot wait indefinitely for circumstances to improve. In his private calculation, the family’s need for income outweighs his moral hesitation; the means begin to seem permissible because the end is, to him, plainly good. This reasoning explains how despair supports his choices without making those choices inevitable or excusing them: he turns structural scarcity into a personal verdict and then treats the people ahead of him as removable barriers.

The pressure of carrying out this campaign further diminishes his capacity to enjoy life. Nearly two months into it, Burke says that food, music, television, driving, and the feeling of sun on his face have all become flat and drab. He explicitly distinguishes this erosion from the original downsizing: he blames the grim life of continually thinking about and committing violence. He expects color and pleasure to return once the campaign is over, once he has reached the safer far shore of a new job and a restored life. That imagined recovery is itself part of the trap: he makes relief conditional on completing a course of action that is already consuming him.

Exposure, Concealment, and Family Stakes

As Burke pursues Fallon, his despair takes practical form in a deadline-driven plan. He fears that Fallon’s children will arrive for their summer visit before he can act, and counts the days around the Fourth of July. Weekends are unavailable, as are Mondays and Wednesdays, when Marjorie works; after picking her up and getting home, he considers it too late to drive to Slate, New York. If he misses the opportunity that Thursday night, he believes he will have to wait five days, by which time the children may already be there. The calendar turns family obligations and travel patterns into constraints on a murder attempt, exposing how completely his sense of urgency has overtaken ordinary judgment.

When Fallon catches him in the house, Burke conceals his purpose by presenting himself as a desperate job seeker who wants advice. He claims he has come to discuss the work, improve his ability to talk about it, and prepare for a decision about whether a production line will remain in place or be moved to Canada. Fallon recognizes the desperation in Burke’s manner. Burke admits that he is desperate and says he does not want to lose the job; the plea for professional help is a cover, but it also draws on the real fear driving him. The scene makes his deception and his distress difficult to separate: he uses the truth of his need to make a lie more persuasive.

The Unresolved Ending of Despair

After Fallon’s death, Burke expects the job opportunity to follow. He spends the weekend in a contented daze, certain that the position is open and that the call will come. When Monday passes without a call, however, the waiting turns quickly into renewed fear. Alone in the house while Marjorie is away, he paces and imagines that another résumé has been favored or that Arcadia is promoting someone already on its staff. The silence from an employer that once meant rejection now threatens to make the violence seem insufficient.

Burke admits that he would like to stop and desperately wants to stop, but insists to himself that he will not stop until he has the job. He also believes he has learned how to protect himself and will never again be made a victim; anyone who causes trouble for him, whether in corporate life or personally, is now a potential target of retaliation. The unanswered phone at the end leaves the promised restoration out of reach. His despair has not been cured by removing a rival: it has become a permanent readiness to treat obstruction as danger, while the ordinary means of security—an employer’s call—remain uncertain.