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Chapter 5
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in American Pastoral, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Heroes, Legends, and Myth-Making
Family, Responsibility, and Duty
The Irrationality of Suffering
The Unknowability of Others
American Ideals
Summary
Analysis
Merry has become a Jain, part of an Indian religious sect. The Swede isn’t familiar with the religion and doesn’t know whether Merry’s extreme asceticism is typical of the religion or something of her own creation. She wears a veil over the lower half of her face so as not to harm “the microscopic organisms in the air we breathe,” and she doesn’t clean herself “because she revere[s] all life, including the vermin,” or the organisms that live in water. She doesn’t walk in the dark, to prevent crushing any living thing that might dwell there. Merry’s rented room in an old boarding house is in dangerous part of Newark just off the McCarter Highway. The house might once have been a respectable boarding house, but it’s since fallen into disrepair. Its narrow street is littered with debris. Many houses in this part of town have had cornices stolen. Factories have been stripped of copper tubing.
Merry, it seems, has veered from one extreme to its opposite. Whereas before she was quick to commit violence, now she avoids violence to the extreme, fearful even to harm “the microscopic organisms in the air we breathe.” Having evaded punishment at the hands of the law, she has committed herself to carrying out a self-imposed punishment. It's ironic that the Swede and Dawn strived to raise a daughter not bound by any stifling religious norms, only for Merry to find religion on her own—and to such an extreme, seemingly harmful degree. The location of Merry’s apparent home, in the city’s ruins, makes the failure of the Swede’s so-called American Dream come sharply into focus. That is, he worked hard so that his daughter’s quality of life could be better than his, not worse. And yet, here she is.
Themes
Merry and the Swede walk to Merry’s boarding house because she refuses to ride in a car. Her small room contains only a pallet to sleep on and a pile of rags for clothing. She is so thin she looks emaciated. The Swede shudders at the thought of Dawn coming here and seeing how Merry lives. Now, he reads the five “vows” Merry has taken, which she’s written on index cards and tacked to the walls of her room. In her vows, she renounces killing, “lying speech,” taking anything not giving to her, all sexual pleasures, and all attachments. He wonders why Merry has taken such extreme vows. For “purity”? To purify her soul for killing Dr. Conlon? Or to purify her soul after “[t]hat foolish kiss”?
One should think it would be difficult for any parent to see their child living in such decrepit conditions, but it’s notable that the Swede’s horror at seeing how Merry lives seems to exceed the horror he suffered when he didn’t know how Merry was doing or even if she was alive. It speaks, in a sense, to how much weight he places on appearances: the true horror of what Merry has done and what’s become of her as a result hits home when he can see its unpleasantness with his own eyes. Intellectually, in the abstract, the true horror of Merry’s crime and its aftermath are more difficult for the Swede to understand or react to.
Themes
Seeing Merry’s pitiful existence up close, the Swede thinks she would be “better off steeped in contempt.” He’d much prefer having his angry, stuttering daughter back than this shell of a person. Merry has just abandoned one “empty-headed idea” for another. The Swede doesn’t understand how a daughter who was so smart and did so well in school has become this person. Merry used to launch the same insult back at him to criticize his capitalism, and yet it’s Merry who has never thought for herself. Her existence now is no different from her pretending to be Audrey Hepburn as a young girl.
Merry’s absurd, exaggerated, and seemingly sudden dedication to a new cause certainly does evoke some of the naivety of her former radicalism. At the same time, it's hypocritical of the Swede to accuse her of not thinking for herself when his whole existence is predicated on keeping up appearances and upholding social norms—the very opposite of thinking for oneself.
Themes
The Swede asks Merry how long she’s lived here, and she tells him six months. She became a Jain a year ago after reading books about religion—she spent a lot of time in libraries to avoid detection. When the Swede asks Merry if she eats enough, she tells him she only “destroy[s] plant life.” Ideally, though, she would “harm no living being.” The Swede points out that this would mean she could eat nothing, and Merry agrees. She says that that the traditional way the perfect Jain ends their life is by self-starvation.
Merry’s explanation for her choice to become a Jain certainly doesn’t do much to persuade the Swede to take her seriously—that she decided to adhere so radically to these extreme practices after only briefly reading up on the religion in the library makes her conversion seem like yet another childish, passing fancy. Her seeming end goal of starving herself to death also reads more as naïve self-indulgence than genuine religious devotion.
Themes
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The Swede doesn’t understand how Merry progressed from simply hating Lyndon Johnson to this, so Merry tries to explain it to him. She tells him that Ghandi, though not a Jain himself, turned to the Jain concept of ahimsa for his ideas about nonviolence. And Ghandi’s nonviolent approach inspired Martin Luther King, and he in turn inspired the opposition to the Vietnam War. Remarkably, Merry tells the Swede all this without stuttering even once. He also detects an intelligence in Merry’s words, and it makes him feel great pain. Abruptly, the Swede asks Merry if it was really her who blew up the post office. She says it was, and that it was the only way to get her message across. When the Swede demands to know who made Merry do it, she insists she acted alone.
The Swede continues to struggle to conceive of Merry as a person in her own right. Merry’s absent stutter doesn’t come as a welcome change for the Swede because it only emphasizes, symbolically, the independent person she’s become in her years away from home and outside of his and Dawn’s influence. Meanwhile, the Swede continues to deny that Merry could have acted of her own volition when she set off the bomb—even as she candidly admits that she acted alone. He still struggles to accept aspects of life he finds problematic or irrational, and so he pretends they don’t exist.
Themes
Suddenly, the Swede remembers an answer young Merry was gave on a homework assignment when asked “Why are we here?” While most of her classmates offered answers like, “to do good,” and so on, Merry had written only: “Life is a short period of time in which you are alive.” The Swede had been struck by Merry’s wisdom at such a young age, and now it registers for him how correct she really was.
The Swede’s memory of Merry’s lightly nihilistic response to her school assignment points to one of the book’s central concerns, the irrationality of suffering—and of life in general. From a young age, Merry has grasped a hard truth that the Swede, as an adult, still struggles to accept: there’s no rhyme or reason to why we exist or what our lives should mean or amount to.
Themes
The Swede tries to talk some sense into Merry. He tells her his guess that she’s really just chosen this lifestyle because she is “terrified of being punished for what [she’s] done” and is punishing herself to avoid facing the consequences for her crime. He tells her she is going to die if she continues living this way—from starvation, or from walking on foot each day through the dangerous part of town where she lives. Merry’s world might be nonviolent, but that’s not true of the people she passes on her walk. To this, Merry replies, “They won’t harm me. They know I love them.” The Swede feels disgust at the naivety of Merry’s words.
The Swede tries to explain Merry’s crime and her actions in its aftermath using the conventional logic of reward and punishment that he’s abided by his whole life: good works deserve reward, and bad deeds are met with punishment. Merry transgressed by setting off the bomb, and having realized that, she has opted to punish herself to atone for that past act of transgression. Merry’s extreme asceticism suggests the senselessness of such logic—regardless of what Merry’s intentions are, it’s clear that her self-inflicted punishment doesn’t do anything to right the wrong she committed years ago. The Swede’s disgust at Merry’s compassion for the downtrodden speaks to his own moral shortcomings. However foolish and unsafe he might find it, Merry’s attitude is (morally speaking) worthy of admiration, not disgust.
Themes
Failing to get through to Merry, the Swede switches gears. He asks her who Rita Cohen is. Merry claims not to know. She also claims not to have gotten the money the Swede brought Rita to give to her. She claims that the Swede found her not because Rita brought him to her, but simply because he was meant to look for her and eventually just happened to succeed. The Swede thinks about how just as Merry came from his house, Rita Cohen came from someone else’s house, raised by parents not so different from him.
It's unclear if Merry really doesn’t know who Rita Cohen is or if she’s lying. If the reader understands Rita as a literary creation of Nathan Zuckerman’s meant to symbolize the Swede’s internalized guilt and his failure to recognize Merry as a person in her own right, then Merry and the Swede’s disagreement about Rita here emphasizes the Swede’s unrelenting failure to understand and accept Merry’s guilt.
Themes
The Swede remembers sitting with Lou Levov and watching a TV news special about the search for the underground Weathermen—all middle-class, Jewish young adults. Lou Levov thoughtlessly remarked, “I remember when Jewish kids were home doing their homework. What happened?” Lou lamented the horror of Jewish people having escaped oppression, only for their children to “run away from no-oppression.” Where once they strove not to be poor, now their children strive not to be rich. But still, the Swede thinks now, Rita is different from his Merry: Rita is “a case unto herself: a vicious slut and a common crook.”
Lou Levov’s lament about the good old days, when “Jewish kids were at home doing their homework,” not going out and contributing to civic unrest, is an oversimplification if a much bigger, societal conflict. It shows how he, like his son, idealizes the past to try to convey his confusion and dismay at the present. Again, if readers understand Rita as a literary creation of Nathan Zuckerman’s meant to symbolize the Swede’s failure to accept Merry’s guilt, then his ungenerous characterization of Rita as “a vicious slut and a common crook” represents what he’d like—but can’t bring himself—to say about his daughter, either out of love for Merry, or perhaps out of pride.
Themes
Merry next tells the Swede where she went immediately after the bombing. She sought refuge with Sheila Salzman, her speech therapist, for the first 72 hours. From there, she moved from place to place, assuming 15 aliases in total. She got her present name, Mary Stoltz, off a name she found on a gravestone of an infant who died roughly around the year Merry was born. A movement minister helped her. With that, she was able to get a birth certificate and Social Security number. Mary Stoltz washed dishes in a retirement home for a year, then the minister sent her to Chicago, giving her the address of a commune there. She was raped and robbed her first night in Chicago.
This passage delivers a shocking revelation: Merry’s speech therapist, a professional the Levovs presumably believed they could trust to help and protect their daughter, apparently hid Merry from law enforcement following the bombing. What could have motivated Sheila to do this remains unclear at this point in the novel, but the development adds to the Swede’s conviction that the logical, sensible world he grew up in is falling apart. It suggests to him that he can no longer rely on the institutions and rules he once trusted to maintain order and stability in his life.
Themes
In Chicago, Merry washed dishes at a dive bar. She was very lonely there, and every day she felt the urge to call home. When this happened, she’d find a diner and order a sandwich and a milkshake to distract herself. In time, she learned to live alone and no longer felt the need for a family. From Chicago, she traveled to Portland and was involved in two bombings there. Three people died. Merry became an expert at wiring bombs after these subsequent attacks, enjoying the precision of the work. At the commune in Oregon, Merry met and fell in love with a woman who lived at the commune with her husband, a weaver. Eventually, though, a fight between the woman and her husband necessitated Merry’s leaving.
This passage indirectly points to some similarities between herself and the Swede in her careful, expert skills at wiring bombs—her precision and her care for her craft resemble the Swede’s knowledge of leatherworking and the glove trade. In the way Merry has adopted the traditions of her family and distorted them to commit horrific, senseless violence, the book represents the general chaos the world has descended into after the initial optimism and progress that characterized the immediate postwar years.
Themes
From Oregon, Merry continued on to Idaho, and from there she began to form a plan to travel to Cuba, where she believed she’d no longer need to go by her alias. By this point, she felt aiding in the revolution in America was a lost cause, and she figured she could be better help working toward the revolution there. She traveled to Miami and had a close call with the FBI there. She sought refuge with a homeless woman, Bunice, who later died of cancer. It was around this time that Merry started going to libraries and learning about religion.
Merry, upon fleeing Old Rimrock, has tried to live in a way that more closely aligns with her ideals, giving up the creature comforts of her parents’ middle-class existence and barely scraping by while on the run from the law. While her commitment to her ideals is admirable in some ways, there is also a tragic futility to it—nothing she’s done has brought about the change she claims to desire. All that has noticeably changed about her life since she went into hiding is that she and her family have undergone tremendous suffering.
Themes
As Merry tells the Swede her story, the Swede starts to believe this woman can’t possibly be his daughter—she must be a caricature, an actor someone has hired to antagonize him. He asks her questions to try to prove her identity, but she refuses to answer. Desperate, he rips the veil from Merry’s face and forcefully pries her mouth open. Still, she refuses to speak. The Swede sees that one of her teeth is missing, and he takes in the full, putrid odor of her unwashed, rotting body for the first time. She smells of human waste, and it disgusts him. He feels the sudden urge to vomit. Frantically, he begs Merry to leave this place and come with him, but Merry refuses. She pleads with the Swede to let her be, if he really loves her. He leaves.
The Swede’s doubt over whether the woman speaking to him is his daughter speaks to his continued refusal to see Merry as an individual with agency and personal beliefs rather than an extension of himself and the things he’s been brought up to value. Merry’s unwashed, stinking body so disgusts the Swede because, symbolically, it makes visible the disorder and chaos that have always lurked beneath the veneer of respectability he’s established for his family, and which has always threatened his tenuous control over that life. Merry’s horrific appearance shows him how suddenly and how irrationally everything good can fall apart. His refusal to recognize her as his daughter, then his disgust at her, and finally his choice to leave her as she is all point to the Swede’s continued refusal to accept this hard truth about life’s underlying irrationality and the limited capacity of hard work and good intentions to keep one’s life stable, happy, and ordered.
Themes
The Swede goes to the factory and sits at his desk, trying not to think about all what he’s just seen and learned. He tries to forget the four people Merry blew up, instead focusing on her rape. The Swede flashes back to waiting out the riots with Vicky in the factory. They watched police aim at a woman who appeared in a window across the street. They shot, and she fell down. After the National Guard left, there was nothing left but “smoldering rubble.” Not during the height of the riots or afterward did he abandon his factory or his workers, “and still his daughter is raped.” And there is nothing he can do about it now. He thinks about the deep, physical love he and Dawn had for Merry, and he cannot understand how all this has happened to Merry—a loved and “perfectly normal child.”
The timing of the Swede’s reflection on his and Vicky’s harrowing experience of the Newark Riots is significant—having just come from seeing Merry in her downtrodden state, he is deeply troubled and seems to be reeling with conflicted feelings of guilt, sadness, and confusion. As Merry’s father, he no doubt feels guilt about his failure to protect her or raise her to protect herself—his fixation on Merry’s sexual assault makes this clear. On the other hand, his instinct to recall this scene with Vicky seems like a desperate plea to paint himself in a positive light and so defend himself against these guilty thoughts. He was an upstanding, moral father and man: his choice to stick around in Newark out of loyalty to his employees makes this clear. Thus, he reasons, he can’t possibly be to blame for Merry’s downward spiral.
Themes
The Swede needs to talk to someone, so he calls Jerry. It’s half past five. Jerry is at work, but he says he can talk—his patients can wait. The Swede tells Jerry that he found Merry in Newark. He describes the horrific state of her health and the conditions in which she lives. He tells Jerry about the rape. Jerry replies frankly. If the room is so awful, then the Swede should return to Merry and take her away from that place—to hell with what Merry wants. He accuses the Swede of “acceding to [Merry] the way [… he has] accede to everything in [his] life.” He also accuses the Swede of loving Merry [a]s a thing,” caring only about creating a beautiful image for his life. He suggests the Swede doesn’t want to bring Merry home because he doesn’t want to create a “bad scene.”
This scene is notable in that it brings together two characters readers have met separately but who have yet to interact with each other in the novel. Readers should remember that practically everything they have seen of the Swede’s life is mere speculation on Nathan Zuckerman’s part—an attempt to humanize and bring nuance to the boyhood hero he fears myth and legend may have mischaracterized. In this conversation, Nathan draws on some of what Jerry told him about the Swede at the reunion, namely that the Swede was overwhelmingly concerned with the outward appearance of his life.
Themes
Jerry continues. For their entire life, the Swede has focused on “decorum,” on keeping conflict at bay and not ruffling any feathers. He “never breaks the code.” Now, Merry has destroyed all that. The Swede realizes how different he and his brother are. He regrets calling him, but he can’t bear to be alone with his thoughts. Jerry accuses the Swede of keeping his true self a secret, living only on the surface through all his “norms”—norms Merry has totally destroyed. Everything in the Swede’s life—running the business, marrying Miss New Jersey—have been for “the appearance,” and now he has nothing to show for it.
Jerry reinforces his main gripe with his older brother: that he is overly focused on “decorum” and “never breaks the code,” living his life according to social convention and relying on established norms and institutions to bring stability and contentment to his life. The problem now is that Merry’s crime and its fallout have uncovered the true tenuousness and superficiality of those norms, which were never all that stable or reliable to begin with.
Themes
The Swede, feeling upset and betrayed, wonders why now is the time Jerry has chosen to let out what he really thinks of his older brother—to air his grievances about living “in [the Swede’s] shadow.” Jerry, after all, is an important cardiac surgeon. How can he feel inferior? Jerry also claims that Lou Levov always let the Swede off easy. He let him “slide through” at every point of his life, and that, ultimately, is why no one really knows who the Swede is, and why the Swede knows nothing about the world. He doesn’t know what it means to be a man, to be a father. Living in picturesque Old Rimrock, the Swede doesn’t know about America—how “frightening” and chaotic it is. All the Swede knows is how to make a glove—just like his father.
The timing of Jerry’s tirade is rather ill timed and lacking in compassion, given the obvious state of duress the Swede was under when he called him. Still, Jerry makes some salient points. Notably, he suggests that the Swede’s present anguish isn’t due to a changed, chaotic world—it’s the result of his no longer being able to exist in a bubble, unencumbered by the irrational chaos and suffering that has always plagued humanity. When Jerry complains that all the Swede knows how to do is make gloves, he’s suggesting that the Swede’s happiness wasn’t real because it was contingent on the Swede maintaining his sheltered, sanitized, and privileged perspective.
Themes
Jerry continues. The Swede “wanted Miss America,” and now he’s got her—it’s his daughter. He wanted to be a real American, and now he is: Merry’s act of violence has ripped him from his picturesque, fake life and thrown him right down into the America in which regular Americans live, into “America amok.” Jerry is shouting now. If the Swede really loved his daughter, he'd have never left her in her filthy room.
Jerry here points to the gap between the idealized vision of America the Swede has aspired to and the reality of America as it actually is—and has been. Merry’s crime does not reflect a changed world, but rather the fact that the Swede can no longer rely on superficial markers of success to shield him from the world as it really is.
Themes
At his desk at Newark Maid, the Swede is weeping uncontrollably now. He can’t believe Jerry has waited his entire life to say these things to him. But Jerry’s not done yet. He attacks the Swede for his fake life—for the Jewish Swede and Catholic Dawn living out in Old Rimrock, “playing at being Wasps.” The Swede thought he could keep up that charade without having to pay, but everything has a price. The Swede’s price to pay is to return to that horrible room and retrieve Merry. Jerry will even do it himself. But if the Swede wants a “bail out,” Jerry says, there’s an easy one within reach: admit that Merry is a monster and be done with her. The Swede can’t accept either of these options. With this, Jerry tells the Swede he’s on his own and hangs up.
In Jerry’s closing remarks, he reinforces the main criticisms he’s directed at the Swede thus far: his superficiality, his vain belief that the world will continue to accommodate his idealized vision of what an American life ought to look like. Here, Jerry also nods to the Swede’s foolishness in thinking he and Dawn could “play[] at being Wasps” (“Wasp” is an acronymous slang term that stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant and generally refers to America’s elite ruling class). He essentially accuses them of distancing themselves from their working-class, immigrant backgrounds to gain acceptance in the American mainstream and expecting it to not cost them anything. When Jerry claims that Merry’s crime is the price the Swede has paid, he's reinforcing his earlier argument that the Swede’s all-American life was a sham all along and that Merry’s crime and its aftermath have merely alerted the Swede to that fact. When the Swede declines to go get Merry, he chooses to stay in denial about the falseness of his life.
Themes
