Volvo exposed gear shift lever

The exposed gearshift shaft in the Volvo is a small, persistent mechanical failure that becomes consequential through use. Once the knob is removed and the shaft left bare, an ordinary control in the family car turns into a sharp intrusion: it hurts Helen’s hand, gives her a private means of pain, and, in the collision, becomes the first thing to break Duncan’s fall. Its recurrence links domestic procrastination to bodily injury without making the accident’s violence feel remote or abstract.

The Unfinished Repair

Both Helen and Garp had delayed dealing with the loose gearshift knob. Helen proposed ordering a replacement and having it fitted while she waited, rather than leaving the car at the garage for a day. She tossed the knob to Garp; he carried it out and taped it precariously back onto the shaft. The fix did not hold. The repeated failure was practical as well as irritating: when Garp took the Volvo, student volunteers at the vehicle pits were slow to emerge and drive him, sometimes costing him an hour and disrupting his work. He consequently decided that the car was Helen’s responsibility.

The shaft’s exposure also makes the neglected repair hard to ignore. Driving to her office with the knob off, Helen felt the bare metal hurt her hand as she shifted. Her scratched wrist bled onto the fresh skirt of her suit. She carried the knob across the parking lot because its printed numbers would let her call the garage; she considered throwing it down a storm sewer, then thought she might mail it to Garp. The small part thus remains attached to the unresolved task even when it is no longer attached to the car.

A Change in Its Use

The exposed shaft acquires a different significance for Helen after her relationship with Michael Milton. Driving home from work, she grows fond of its sharpness and presses the heel of her hand against it until she is close to breaking the skin. The pressure brings tears to her eyes and, as she arrives home, makes her feel clean again. At the house, the boys wave and shout from the television window, while Garp tells her what he has prepared for dinner. The injured hand and the warmth of domestic welcome meet in the same recurring scene: the shaft provides a private sensation Helen uses to manage feelings connected to her affair, though its presence does not resolve the strain of that relationship.

For Garp, by contrast, the bare metal registers as a danger to the children. During a drive, Duncan kneels on Walt’s foot and pushes him out from between the bucket seats; Walt cries and coughs. Garp downshifts hard, and the shaft’s uncovered tip bites his hand. He angrily points out to Duncan that the gearshift is like a spear and warns him against falling on it if Garp has to stop suddenly. Duncan asks why he does not get it fixed. The exchange puts the unresolved repair into plain terms: Garp recognizes the hazard, yet the family continues to ride in the car with it exposed.

The Collision and Its Consequences

In the crash, the warning becomes literal. The Volvo’s children are thrown loose inside the car, and Duncan is flung forward between the bucket seats. The exposed tip is the first thing to break his fall. Garp reaches into the gap but is too late; Duncan’s right eye is gouged out, and three fingers on his right hand are broken when that hand is jammed into the seatbelt release mechanism. The shaft is not the whole cause of the collision, but it is the immediate object against which Duncan’s body strikes as he is thrown forward.

The severity of the injuries contrasts with the Volvo’s relatively low speed. By no one’s estimate was it moving faster than twenty-five, or at most thirty-five, miles per hour, yet the three-ton Buick scarcely yielded to Garp’s coasting car. The impact throws the children about inside the Volvo and injures the adults as well. The bare gearshift therefore belongs to a wider chain of forces—collision, unrestrained movement within the car, and hard interior surfaces—but its sharp tip gives the accident a specific, terrible point of contact.

Significance as a Recurring Object

Across these episodes, the shaft changes from a troublesome feature of an unrepaired car into a bodily presence that different family members experience in different ways. Helen’s hand meets it in routine driving and later seeks its sharp pressure; Garp feels it bite him during a hard downshift and identifies its danger to Duncan; Duncan finally falls against it in the crash. The object does not merely stand for neglect: its material shape and position affect what happens, first making shifting painful and then contributing directly to the injury.

Its repeated appearances also make the car’s everyday interior newly visible. A gearshift is normally an unremarked instrument of control, but without its knob the shaft becomes hard, exposed, and spear-like. The repair that might have returned it to ordinary use remains undone through the family’s drives, until the ordinary act of riding in the Volvo brings Duncan into contact with it. In this way, the exposed shaft binds a minor domestic postponement to a lasting bodily consequence, while remaining one element within the larger violence of the collision.