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Chapter 8
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
One of the girls the Levovs hired to help at the dinner tells the Swede he has a phone call. The Swede takes the call in Dawn’s downstairs study. It’s Rita Cohen. “They” have been following him, Rita tells him. Angrily, she asks the Swede why he refused to lie to Merry and say that he had sex with Rita in the hotel room. As Rita talks, the Swede look at the model home that Bill Orcutt earlier placed in the office. He sees the bed in the model bedroom, “awaiting its two occupants.” The Swede considers that if Merry lied about knowing Rita, then she might also have been lying about Sheila hiding her—and then, he and Sheila can still run away to Ponce when Dawn and Orcutt move in together. If Lou Levov drops dead as a result of all that, “they’d just have to bury him.”
Rita Cohen’s reemergence here ups the tension as the narrative approaches its climax in the final chapter—the surreal quality of her character exacerbates the Swede’s already frenzied, agitated state after seeing what has become of Merry and learning about Dawn’s affair. His sudden impulse to run away with Sheila—someone he now despises, knowing that she hid the fugitive Merry and didn’t tell him about it—shows how at the height of his confused anguish, he has abandoned all logic and reason. His glib pronouncement that if Lou drops dead out of shame and disappointment at this, “they’d just have to bury him,” reinforces the Swede’s new rejection of the morals and conventions that have thus far informed all his actions.
Themes
The Swede wonders if Merry is lying, and perhaps no Rita Cohen exists at all. But then he grounds himself. Of course Rita exists. Someone must have brainwashed her, “someone corrupt and cynical and distorted”— Merry can’t have done all the horrible things she has done on her own. Rita mocks the Swede for thinking he ought to bring Merry back “to all [the] dopey pleasures” of his middle-class existence and rip her away from her present life of “holiness.” The Swede’s thoughts of anger and confusion race until his mind suddenly stills. He thinks, if only briefly, that “his capacity for suffering no longer exists.”
Yet again, the Swede demonstrates his refusal to confront and accept the disintegration of his idyllic American pastoral when he refuses to acknowledge Merry’s guilt. Merry’s crime and all the suffering it brought into his formerly idyllic life has tested the Swede’s faith in institutions, in social norms, and in America in general. With his passing thought that “his capacity for suffering no longer exists,” the Swede—like the biblical Job—suggests that perhaps he’s finally ready to give up on moral uprightness.
Themes
The Swede hangs up the phone and the thought strikes him that Rita is back, and something awful must be on the verge of happening. Tonight, things will come crashing down. Suddenly he hears a knock at the door—it’s Sheila. The Swede grabs Sheila and pushes her against the door. “You took her in!” he hisses. An angry confrontation ensues. Sheila insists that nothing she did changed things for Merry. She already blew up the building. And Sheila didn’t know about the bombing when Merry first arrived at her door—she only heard about it on the news later that day. And Merry was already in her house by then—what was Sheila to do?
The narration once more foreshadows further chaos for the Swede with his characterization of Rita as a harbinger of doom. That foreshadowing immediately proves prescient with the onset of the Swede’s tense conflict with Sheila over her secretly harboring Merry five years ago. Sheila appeals to logic to justify her actions, suggesting that keeping Merry for a night did nothing to reverse the damage wrought by Merry’s bomb.
Themes
The Swede insists Sheila should have called him. “You lock her in the house and keep her there.” Sheila insists that Merry was in a horrible state, “yelling about the war and her family.” She talked about the Swede with such hatred that Sheila wondered if something “very wrong had happened to that girl.” In retrospect, Sheila admits, “I think maybe that’s what I was trying to figure out when we were together.” The affair settled Sheila’s doubts, though, assuring her that the Swede was in fact “kind and compassionate,” just as she’d thought before Merry bombed the post office.
Notably, the Swede’s angry insistence that Sheila “lock [Merry] in the house and keep her there” echoes his father’s words early in the evening, when Lou suggested that parents should lock their kids in the home to prevent them from being exposed to smutty, immoral media like Deep Throat. The Swede has come a long way since the earlier, more innocent days when he felt he could adequately protect and guide Merry using more egalitarian, humane parenting methods. Rita’s suspicion that something “very wrong had happened to that girl” insinuates that she felt the Swede may have been abusing his daughter. One wonders whether the Swede’s paranoia about the ill-advised kiss he gave young Merry in fact has a basis in reality—could the kiss and his subsequent distance from Merry have affected her as deeply as he fears it did?
Themes
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Sheila holds tight to her conviction that there’s nothing she could have done, even after the Swede tells Sheila that Merry went on to kill three other people, and that Sheila could have prevented those deaths by telling him. Their argument unsettled, the Swede rejoins the others on the candlelit terrace. Dessert—a strawberry-rhubarb pie from McPherson’s—has been served. Now that the conversation has moved on from Deep Throat, the Umanoffs and Bill Orcutt are once more chatting amiably together. Sylvia is chatting with Dawn and the Salzmans. The Swede lies and tells Dawn he was taking a business call. Lou and Jessie aren’t outside. Sylvia explains that they “went somewhere together.”
Still determined to cling to his faith in a just, rational world, the Swede attempts to quantify the consequences of Sheila’s actions, suggesting that she indirectly caused the deaths of three people by harboring the fugitive Merry. The Swede’s lie to Dawn about the phone call from Rita Cohen comes off as especially cowardly and hypocritical coming after his angry confrontation with Sheila over her failure to alert the Levovs to Merry’s whereabouts all those years ago.
Themes
Bill Orcutt tells the Swede that Lou has taken Jessie into the kitchen to eat a slice of fresh pie the right way, standing in the kitchen with a glass of milk. The Swede looks at Orcutt and remembers when he dumped Orcutt in a pick-up football game years ago. Orcutt had been more aggressive than the Swede thought acceptable for a simple pick-up game, and so he momentarily showed his athletic prowess to catch a long pass from Bucky Robinson, push Orcutt down, and “prance” off to score. That, the Swede remembers thinking, would teach Orcutt to look down on him. Now, the Swede realizes Orcutt has always been no good. He comments on seeing Orcutt’s model home in Dawn’s office, noting “I think you’re going to be very happy in it,” not realizing his error.
Although the novel has shown how unwavering commitment to duty and social convention can lead people astray, there’s something touching about Lou’s care for Jessie in this final section of the novel. Though he has no obligation to look after Jessie—and, if the Swede’s suspicions are correct, he may well resent her and all her squandered privilege—he does so anyway because she’s a fellow human in pain and it’s the right thing to do. The Swede, on the other hand, continues to act rashly and with no regard for social convention. He snidely—if unconsciously—draws attention to Orcutt’s affair with Dawn with his remark that Orcutt will “be very happy in [the new house],” insinuating that Orcutt, not the Swede, will be the man to move into the house with Dawn.
Themes
Just then, the Swede realizes that he should have forced Merry to come home—he needs to go back to the dilapidated old boarding house and get her. If he finds Rita is there with Merry, he’ll kill her. He can drive and get Merry now, but what about Lou? The man would die if he were to see Merry in her present state.
The Swede’s sudden urge to bring Merry home represents the Swede’s choice, at last, to see his daughter for who she is and help her where she’s at—even if doing so destroys irreparably the idyllic vision the Swede has in mind for his life. His new willingness to kill Rita, then, represents his new determination to silence the nagging voice in his head that has denied Merry’s guilt all these years and his coming to terms with the ugly, senseless place his life has somehow arrived at.
Themes
The Swede returns to Dawn and holds her hand, and he realizes then that he cannot imagine life without her, just as he imagines she must want to return to him. “But she can’t because it’s all too awful.” She birthed a murderer, and she can’t live with that. The Swede realizes he should have listened to his father when he said not to marry Dawn. It was the one time he disobeyed his father, but it was the one time that mattered. And the marriage had proven Lou correct: in raising Merry as neither a Catholic nor a Jew, she became “first a stutterer, then a killer, then a Jain.”
This passage features more biblical imagery to describe the Swede’s new state of acceptance and disillusionment. He likens his marriage to Dawn as his original sin, which set into motion all the misfortune that would befall him later in life. He no longer has any fantastical wish to return to the way things once were—he grasps that there is no returning to paradise once one has been expelled. Dawn—with her new face, new house, and new lover—seems to have already come to terms with the ramifications of her and the Swede’s fall from grace. She realizes that there’s no going back to the idyllic life she and the Swede once had together with Merry, and so she instead chooses to move forward with a new life, even if it’s but a lesser permutation of the first.
Themes
The Swede members how he secretly brought Dawn to the factory to meet with Lou, to try to resolve their differences. He pleaded with Dawn not to mention to Lou about any of “the stuff”—the crosses, the Virgin Mary sculptures—her family has at home. They’re “sore subjects” with Lou. The Swede wasn’t defending his father’s views, but he wanted the meeting between Lou and Dawn to go as smoothly as it possibly could. Dawn, irritated, didn’t want to lie. The Swede felt stuck.
The narration has thus far presented Dawn and the Swede as being on the same page as far as religion is concerned, with both content to leave the traditions of their parents behind to start a new life together. But Dawn’s insistence on being totally forthcoming about her family’s Catholicism indicates that religion perhaps means more to her than it does to the Swede.
Themes
The Swede next recalls Lou’s discovery of Merry’s baptismal certificate—Dawn had done it in secret, with her mother, and she only told the Swede after she returned home that evening. Lou found out when Merry was six years old. Lou would go on to blame this, the Christmas tree, and her grandma Dwyer’s influence for all the trouble that Merry got into after. Grandma Dwyer would take Merry to church with her whenever she got the chance, and Lou resented it despite the Swede’s insistence that Merry didn’t take any of the religion seriously.
Dawn’s move to go behind the Swede’s back and baptize Merry in secret reinforces the idea that she and the Swede are not exactly on the same page about religion. At the very least, Dawn seems more committed to honoring her family’s traditions than the Swede is.
Themes
The scene returns to the meeting between Dawn and Lou at the factory that the Swede arranged before he and Dawn married. Lou grills Dawn about her Catholicism and her family’s Catholicism. Dawn insists she isn’t particularly religious, though her mother (Grandma Dwyer) attends church every Sunday. Dawn insists she doesn’t find anything too wrong with it. She describes the image of baby Jesus in the manger as a “pleasant and comforting” scene that is important for its depiction of “humility.” She doesn’t see what’s so wrong or bad about it.
This tense scene between Dawn and Lou sheds a bit more light on what religion means to Dawn on a personal level—above all, she finds the notion of a benevolent and forgiving God to be “pleasant and comforting,” as illustrated by the scene of “humility” that is baby Jesus in the manger. The book draws an implicit parallel between Dawn’s embrace of religion and other characters’ embrace of duty and convention: both promise comfort and reassurance in exchange for one’s faith in whichever system they choose to believe in.
Themes
Lou asks what Dawn’s parents say about Jewish people. Dawn at first just says that when she was a little girl, she didn’t like the thought of her Jewish school friend not going to heaven. Then she admits that her mother has said “the usual things you hear” about Jewish people: that they are “pushy” and “materialistic.” Her father sometimes says “Jew” in a derogatory fashion but insists it’s not out of genuine hatred.
Lou’s interrogation here is blunt, and certainly Dawn is not responsible for her parents’ derogatory and backward views of Jewish people. However, he does gesture toward the compelling question of how possible it is to truly exist apart from one’s family, and from one’s cultural and historical background.
Themes
The subject of children arises, and Dawn admits she’d like for her child to be baptized. She explains that it’s about washing away original sin so a child can get into heaven. Lou says he can compromise and allow the baptism, but he draws the line at First Communion—he won’t have his grandchild “eat Jesus.” When Lou brings up the subject of a Bar Mitzvah, Dawn starts to become overwhelmed and wants to end the conversation. Lou tells her he admires her for “fighting this fight,” and he insists they continue—“later never works,” he insists. “We work it out now or never.” Dawn refuses a Bar Mitzvah, Lou says they don’t have an agreement, and Dawn replies that in that case, she and the Swede just won’t have any children. Lou, frustrated, suggests everyone just go their separate ways. He ends the conversation abruptly.
Lou and Dawn fail to reach a compromise that satisfies both of them, and in the end they leave matters unresolved. Within the context of Nathan Zuckerman’s manuscript about the Swede’s life, this scene between Lou and Dawn—which Nathan’s story presents as a memory the Swede reflects on as he grapples with his failed marriage—represents the Swede’s continued effort to find a rational explanation for the suffering in his life he can’t explain. Like the biblical figures the novel has previously alluded to (like Job or Adam and Eve), the Swede has disobeyed his father, and he reasons now that all the ways his life has run amok are the consequence of that original sin.
Themes
Eventually, though, Lou caved. Dawn and the Swede were married, and Merry was born and secretly baptized. Until Dawn’s father died in 1959, both sides of the family got together each year for Thanksgiving in Old Rimrock. Dawn’s father and Lou even got along well, reminiscing to each other about the way life used to be. It was harder for Mrs. Dwyer and Sylvia Levov to find common ground. Mrs. Dwyer would prattle on about church and Sylvia would sit and smile in silence, too polite to do otherwise. They would get along well enough, seeing one another only once a year to gather around the table to eat “one colossal turkey.”
Though things were never perfect among the Levov-Dwyer clan, the family at least managed to come together once a year to celebrate Thanksgiving over “one colossal turkey,” an image that embodies the Americana the Swede has coveted all his life. In a different universe, one in which Merry doesn’t commit an awful crime, moves on from her radicalism, and perhaps starts a family of her own, this conventional, all-American existence might have continued for generations. Though the Swede desperately wants to believe that there’s a clear, single explanation for why his life has ended up the way it has, more often than not, there are no satisfying answers as to why bad things happen.
Themes
Back in the present, Dawn happily recalls a trip to Europe she, the Swede, and Merry took when Merry was a little girl. They walked the streets of Paris with baguettes sticking out of their pockets, knowing they looked like typical American tourists, “a couple of rubes from New Jersey,” but they hadn’t cared. She laughs as she remembers throwing all their luggage out of the moving train after the staff had forgotten to wake them when the train arrived at the platform that morning.
Dawn’s memory of the family’s trip to Europe, when they goofily roamed the streets looking like “a couple of rubes from New Jersey” points to how the Levovs’ happiest moments together were the times they paid no mind to appearances or outward displays of refinement. This fact exacerbates the tragic fate that would befall the family years down the road.
Themes
Dawn carries on about the Levovs’ European vacation. Sheila listens intently, and the Swede thinks she must be pretending: she can’t not be rattled by their recent confrontation in the study. Shelly Salzman, meanwhile, seems genuinely to be listening, “under Dawn’s spell,” transfixed by her charm. It strikes the Swede that Dawn has gone on “as though nothing had happened.” She looks radiant, and the Swede feels a renewed tenderness toward her and her robust, simple straightforwardness.
The Swede’s sense that Dawn has moved on from the couple’s loss of Merry “as though nothing had happened” is deluded at best. Recall how the novel began with Nathan Zuckerman’s lamenting humankind’s infinite capacity to misunderstand others—even when we consciously try not to. Just as Nathan couldn’t have been more wrong about the Swede’s supposedly perfect life, here the Swede is almost certainly getting Dawn wrong. She has lost her only child, her marriage has fallen apart, and the big project of designing the new house is at best a thinly veiled attempt to distract herself from the disorder that has taken hold of her life—she can’t possibly feel “as though nothing ha[s] happened.”
Themes
Sheila, meanwhile, looks dull and “severely withheld” compared to Dawn. The Swede cannot grasp how he once found her more attractive than Dawn and contemplates the “broken, helpless” creature he was in the aftermath of Merry’s crime and disappearance. Perhaps the attraction of Sheila was simply that she was someone else, and he needed a distraction from all he had lost. He wanted to pretend to be someone else. But that was what made it so wrong: it was Dawn alone he wanted to be with, and Dawn who had inspired him to accomplish his greatest feat: “The feat of standing up to his father.” And she had done that by “looking as spectacular as she looked and yet talking like everyone else.”
At once, the Swede recognizes his forgotten love for Dawn. This prompts a wave of subsequent revelations about all the things he has gotten wrong in life. Critically, he has wasted decades of his life running from and lying to himself, abiding by established social norms to avoid having to make any tough decisions for himself. When Merry’s bomb upended his life and made him question the capacity of those norms to protect and stabilize him, he rejected convention entirely to have an affair with Sheila. Now, he realizes that the taboo affair was never going to liberate him from the stifling constraints of societal norms and expectations—it only ever distracted him from facing the reality of his life. When he looks at Dawn with admiration in this scene and recognizes his choice to marry her as the greatest feat of his life—his one true act of defiance—he finally seems to grasp how his devotion to duty and to social norms, and his worship of cherished ideals, have prevented him from having any genuine, lasting happiness in his life.
Themes
The Swede wonders whether it is for deep reasons or arbitrary, irrational reasons that people long for a lifelong mate. Sheila, ever inquisitive, would know. Meanwhile, Dawn continues to talk about Europe. Sheila asks about the farms in Zug, and her interest in “figuring it all out” suddenly enrages the Swede. He considers how exhausting he finds “deep thinkers,” who have never built anything themselves or known how things are built, yet still believe they know all.
The Swede’s sudden resentment of Sheila for her incessant need to “figure[e] it all out” reaffirms the lesson he learned in the previous passage. Sheila’s—and all “deep thinkers,” for that matter—obsession with knowing how things work and making logical sense of people and of the world ultimately inhibits her from knowing anything about life at all.
Themes
As the others chat, the Swede imagines the possible ramifications of telling Sheila, and Jerry on the phone earlier, about Merry’s three other murders. He becomes certain that Sheila will go home and tell Shelly—her even-keeled, ethical husband—who will know that the only thing to do is to call the police and report it. And it will be because, in Shelly’s mind, “she was a little bitch who deserved it.” The Swede imagines calling Shelly later that night and pleading with him to not say anything, to give the Swede a chance to bring Merry home and protect her.
Just as suddenly and violently as they struck, the Swede’s major revelations about all he’s gotten wrong in life vanish as reality sets in and he starts to worry about the real, tangible consequences of his telling Sheila and Jerry about Merry’s three other murders. This is a pattern for the Swede—he has a new, compelling revelation that could perhaps guide him to rearrange his priorities, change his perspective, and live a better, fuller life going forward. Then, before he has a chance to act on his new wisdom, he forgets what he has learned and returns to his old ways. This pattern highlights how even as people try to be more introspective and open to change, people continually lie to themselves and fall back into old, bad habits.
Themes
But then the Swede realizes that the police probably already know, because Jerry has likely already called them. Jerry has turned on his own brother and turned him in to the authorities for hiding a fugitive. And the Swede, by calling Jerry in a moment of vulnerability, has “planted his own bomb.”
When the Swede observes that he has “planted his own bomb” by reaching out to Jerry in a moment of crisis, he literally means that he has cemented his and Merry’s fate by disclosing details that could land them both in legal trouble. The Swede’s observation also points to what he considers the self-defeating nature of honesty—the Swede confided in Jerry because he thought it would make him feel better, but it’s actually just created more potential problems for him.
Themes
Just then, the Swede hears Lou shout, “No!” from the kitchen, and he is certain that Merry has come home on her own and confessed to all four killings to her grandfather—and Lou, unable to accept this confession from the ragged, foul-smelling creature who pretends to be his granddaughter, has dropped dead on the spot.
Tension continues to grow as the novel churns furiously toward its end. With Lou’s shout from the kitchen and the possibility that the wayward daughter Merry may have at last found her way back home, it seems that the Swede’s façade of normalcy has at last fallen. He can no longer keep up the charade that all is well and good in his typical, American life.
Themes
The others run into the kitchen to find Lou standing beside the table with blood on his face. His face is blank as he tries not to weep. It’s the first time he appears to understand that he lacks the power to “prevent anything” he doesn’t want to happen. Jessie Orcutt sits at the table, a half-empty plate and a glass of milk in front of her. One of the hired girls explains that Lou had been feeding Jessie pie and trying to explain to her that she needed to stop drinking. He praised her with each bite of pie she swallowed, and he laughed in delight when suddenly she cried out, “I feed Jessie,” and took the fork from him. Then she stabbed him with the fork, aiming for his eye.
This final scene with Lou and Jessie is in equal parts comical and grotesque, with the brutal violence of Jessie’s act undermined by the ridiculously wholesome image of a freshly baked strawberry-rhubarb pie. Critically, this sort of pie evokes images of quaint Americana—“what’s more American than apple pie?” as the saying goes. Thus, one may interpret Jessie’s assault on Lou as the symbolic dissolution of the quaint American ideals that so many characters (but the Levovs in particular) have clung to in vain as the world as they knew it gradually ceases to exist.
Themes
Bill Orcutt picks up Jessie, who looks completely unaware “that she ha[]s overstepped a boundary fundamental to civilized life.” Jessie missed Lou’s eye by less than an inch. Marcia remarks on Jessie’s good aim for being so drunk. And then Marcia starts to laugh, delighting in the unraveling of the Levovs’ civilized, conventional life. It is clear that “the breach had been pounded in their fortification, even out here in secure Old Rimrock,” and that things will never be the same again.
The novel’s closing scene ends on an ambiguously cynical note that reveals the underlying fragility and tenuousness of the social norms—the“boundar[ies] fundamental to civilized life”—that the Levovs and other conventional American families like theirs have placed so much value in. At the same time, it villainizes those like Marcia who relish the chaos and suffering that befalls a people and an era on the verge of collapse. The violence of Jessie’s assault on Lou represents the completion of the Levovs’ figurative fall from grace—their symbolic expulsion from the paradise of innocence and security their privilege has afforded them. Merry’s violent crime was the catalyst that propelled this fall into motion, and Jessie’s act of violence completes it, showing the Levovs that “even out here in secure Old Rimrock,” they cannot hide forever from the chaos that has overpowered the rest of the world beyond the bounds of their quaint, domestic bliss.
Themes
