For me, Thanksgiving immediately conjures warm memories of family, and as idealized as those memories might be, I can now be thankful that whatever the levels of dysfunction in my own family might be, at least they don't rank up there with the Corrigans'.
In trying to trace the rioot of the sad and awkward existence of these men (and more specifically Jimmy as the last of the line), it seems like the Corrigan men's inability and refusal to accept the responsibility the family life is key. OK maybe that's a "master of the obvious" kind of statement. I just got such a nice, happy, wholesome feeling when Jimmy dines with the Italian family and the father shows affection to his wife. It was a relief to know that such emotion existed in the cold misogynistic world to which the reader has gotten used to at this point.
(In the doctor's office scene), Jimmy's Dad seems to justify his abandonment saying, "Y'know sometimes I think they're the ones who invented gettin' married and all that just so that they could sit around and get fat and ugly in comfort" a few paged later he out right admits that he'd been d0wn the marriage road before and it wasn't his "cuppa tea." The doctor in this scene is a mirror to Jimmy's dad, as he has a daughter that he hasn't scene in years, rationalizing "I guess we all make choices as to how we want to live, right?" But what he doesn't consider is the emotional fall-out that seems to have on the lives of others who were given no choice.
Jimmy's Great-Grandfather sets this wheel in motion with his refusal to be a responsible family man. He can't settle down with a woman because they soon lose "novelty" for him. "How could he be expected to bank on a long term partnership with that?" Jimmy's grandfather writes of his own father's take on a widow he had been rutting. Retrospectively, knowing that this father will soon abandon his own son, we understand that he can't bank on a long term partnership with anyone.
All the Corrigan men seem to have their own different but equally damaging relations with women, and though in Jimmy's (II) case it's simply the fact that he "can't meet them," viewed over the generations, it looks like the problem's in his genes. Or maybe it's just that he wears funny pants.
2 comments:
I felt the same way about the scene with the Italian family, but it wasn't so much for the husband/wife dynamic as it was for the grandpa James/father interaction. I especially loved the frame where James throws his head back and laughs--it's the most (and the most positive) emotion we see out of him, and a bittersweet contrast to the diagram of the real father's laugh a few pages later. As a reader, I was just so relieved for the temporary reprieve from doom and gloom.
I agree with what you said about the men in Jimmy's family as having an "inability and refusal to accept the responsibility of family life," and I think that Jimmy's inability to form relationships, not only with women but with anyone, is a result of the detachment of the men before him. Jimmy grew up without a father-figure and perhaps that sense of early abandonment, plus his mother's overbearing nature, left him unable to form bonds with anyone. It seems necessary though (despite being very sad) that the line ends with Jimmy, because each generation seems to be worse off than the previous, so perhaps it is better that it end with Jimmy.
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