Bunny and Bunny Junior’s father–son relationship

Bunny and Bunny Junior’s father–son relationship is the emotional line that carries the novel from Bunny’s attempt to enlist his son in his own way of life to a final exchange of tenderness at the swimming pool. For much of their journey, Bunny treats fatherhood as a mix of instruction, authority, and companionship, while Bunny Junior listens, observes, and tries to make sense of the losses surrounding him. Their last moments together do not undo the strain between them, but they replace the father’s demands with an experience they share on the child’s terms.

An Unequal Partnership

Bunny takes Bunny Junior with him on a sales journey and presents the trip as a chance to teach him the business. The arrangement puts the boy in the position of learner and companion, but Bunny’s attention is often divided between work and his own impulses. His confident expectations can make him seem to assume that Bunny Junior will simply follow along. In a breakfast-room encounter, Bunny imagines that a waitress will choose to return to him, treating her decision as inevitable; the same self-assurance shapes his broader sense of how people, including his son, ought to respond to him.

At The Wellborne Estate in Portslade, Bunny drives slowly through the residential complex while searching Geoffrey’s customer list for the right flat. As he looks for an address, he offers Bunny Junior a lesson by asking him to picture shaking a large oak or elm. The boy cannot yet explain what would happen, but he listens closely and keeps the information for a time when he may understand it. The episode captures a recurring imbalance: Bunny supplies lessons in his own manner, while Bunny Junior receives them patiently, without pretending that he already knows their meaning.

That educational role becomes more troubling when Bunny frames the boy’s future as a choice between staying with his father to learn sales and returning to school. He asks whether Bunny Junior wants to amount to something, presenting his own trade as the path to achievement and school as its opposite. The boy’s reply shifts the exchange away from Bunny’s terms: he asks to put his glasses back on and says that his eyes hurt and that he may be going blind, asking for eye drops. Bunny insists that he answer the question. Their exchange shows the difference between the lesson Bunny means to give and the urgent concern Bunny Junior is trying to express.

Inherited Lessons and Grief

The relationship also sits within a difficult inheritance. When Poodle makes a disparaging remark about Bunny’s father, Bunny reacts with an unusually direct threat, defending his father even as Poodle is too incapacitated to register the response. Later, Bunny Junior is present as Bunny’s own father complains that he had tried to teach Bunny the business and shown him what a boy should see, only to see him end up selling toilet brushes. The older man’s claim turns the scene into a rebuke across generations: Bunny is both a son who disappointed his father’s vocational hopes and a father trying to direct his own child. The evidence does not make their circumstances identical, but it places Bunny’s ambitions for Bunny Junior beside the failed transmission of his father’s trade.

Bunny Junior’s understanding of family is also shaped by his mother’s absence. He can recall facts such as when construction of the Eiffel Tower began, yet finds it increasingly difficult to picture what Libby Munro looked like. He tries to preserve memories of ordinary time with her as if they were exhibits in the Booth Museum; in one remembered scene, he can picture himself on a swing at St Ann’s Well Gardens but cannot clearly see who is pushing him. His distress over the fading image helps explain why he continues to seek a connection with her, even while travelling with Bunny.

That continuing bond appears in the boy’s visions. In the Punto on Meeching Road in Newhaven, he believes that Libby will eventually find him and imagines her touch and the scent of her hand cream. Later, after Bunny has torn up and swallowed Geoffrey’s customer list, mist gathers around the car, and Bunny Junior sees Libby sitting on a low wall in her orange nightdress. He goes to her, apologizes, and rests against her. When he asks whether this is what she came to tell him, the encounter makes clear that his inner life is not organized solely around his father’s journey. Bunny Junior carries a separate relationship with his mother, formed from memory, grief, and imagined reunion.

The Final Reconciliation

At Butlins, Bunny Junior waits by the pool while Bunny approaches him. Bunny greets him warmly, touches his head, and invites him to look at something. He remembers riding the small electric children’s train as a boy and asks his son to join him. The invitation differs from the earlier pressure to choose a future: it offers a shared experience instead of demanding an answer about school or work.

Bunny Junior turns the large yellow key and starts the train. As it circles the pool, Bunny puts an arm around him; father and son laugh and ring the train’s silver bells. The ride is brief, and Bunny Junior declines when his father asks whether he wants to go around again. The boy’s refusal is accepted without the earlier insistence that he answer Bunny’s chosen question. Together they return to the pool and sit beside one another. Bunny takes off his shoes and socks, puts an arm around Bunny Junior, and presses his lips to the boy’s hair. These small gestures make their closeness physical and immediate, without requiring a new promise about what the child must become.

Bunny is gravely unwell after the crash, and Bunny Junior recognizes signs that something is wrong as they sit by the water. Bunny says he needs to lie down and then falls back beside the pool. His son strokes his brow and kisses him; when Bunny tries to close his eyes, Bunny Junior asks him not to and kisses him again. Bunny dies despite the boy’s efforts to keep him present. The ending therefore makes the reconciliation both real and sharply limited: Bunny and Bunny Junior share tenderness and play, but there is no time for the relationship to continue beyond this scene. Bunny Junior stays with his father, lays his head on his chest, and gives him a final kiss.

What the Relationship Changes

The final train ride reverses the usual direction of instruction. Bunny remembers his own childhood and brings Bunny Junior into that memory, but the boy is the one who turns the key and drives. Bunny’s invitation that it is now his son’s turn gives the child control of the shared activity, a contrast to Bunny’s earlier attempt to define the boy’s choices for him. The change is modest rather than a complete repair: it happens in a single ride, alongside Bunny’s failing condition, and cannot settle the conflicts that shaped their journey.

The relationship is also framed by the unfinished work of the previous generation. Bunny has been judged by his father as someone who failed to carry on the business he was taught; with Bunny Junior, he risks repeating that pattern by treating a child’s future as something he can prescribe. Yet at the pool, the sales lesson and the argument over school recede. What remains is the father’s touch, the boy’s care, and the train circling until it stops. Their closing exchange makes fatherhood less a matter of successfully passing on a trade than of being present to one another, even when that presence can last only a little longer.