24 pages • 48 minutes read
Greg HollingsheadThe Roaring Girl
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
The Boy (Jim)
Jim, who is referred to as “the boy” throughout the story, has many fears and anxieties. He worries about his parents and their ability to make the right decisions. He marvels at their physical beauty—and the ugliness of their feet—but fears that their presence is tenuous. His mother recently experienced a burst appendix, a stillborn, and a nervous breakdown. Her new pregnancy renews the boy’s fears about her safety.
Though limited in his understanding of the world, the boy is a careful observer. He searches for a role model to help him find his way and frequently fantasizes about his stillborn brother, also named Jim.
When the girl arrives, the boy suddenly finds a new and unexpected mentor who is adept at maneuvering safely through the world. The boy doesn’t mind the upheavals she causes in their lives. Instead, her strangeness fascinates him, and he wants to learn everything about her.
The boy’s deepest desire is to be understood. He wants to feel someone look at him as he truly is. The author writes, “He wanted to know in what way it would be possible for himself to be known by her, known completely, like a car she would work on: he wanted to be fixed by her by being known, by being thoroughly and utterly known” (67). Despite living with his loving parents, the boy feels alone. Only when the girl arrives does he realize how much he craves the attention of another. Long content to be a mere observer of life, the boy is grateful to have experienced the summer with the girl, who taught him how to live with joy instead of fear, allowing his heart finally to roar.
The Father
The father is a looming presence in the boy’s life. The boy marvels at his great size, symbolized by the size of his father’s hand which eclipses the light. But the hand also has a mangled fingernail, and the boy often stares at this deformity caused by factory machinery. It reflects the father’s vulnerability to life's dangers, and the boy worries about his father despite his great size.
The father is a hard worker who wants to provide for his wife and son, whom he loves very much. When the mother becomes pregnant, the father realizes he needs to find more ways to make money beyond his factory job. He is a dreamer who likes to come up with money-making ideas but “none of these schemes had ever come to anything” (55), writes the author. The boy is aware of his father’s failures and doubts his father’s ability to succeed with his service station; the father is said to have an “apparent complete lack of automotive know-how” (58).
As impractical as the father is, a flash forward reveals that had he kept the station, it would have become very profitable. Blinded to the ways of the world, the father struggles to achieve his goals. The author writes, “To the boy it seemed sometimes that his father arranged the world to conform to specifications for existence inside his own mind” (65). He desires to follow his own vision for the future, unable to see the roadblocks in the way the boy and the mother can.
The father is shorter than the girl and easily influenced by her language. When she uses profanity in the house, saying, “Look. I’m fuckin’ shattered,” the father begins to use similar language. Like the boy, the father falls under the spell of the roaring. But he is even more in awe of the mother’s roar.
By the end of the story, the father loses his job and spends his time cleaning the house while the mother supports the family by working as a bookkeeper. Given the father’s failure to follow traditional gender roles, the boy views him as weak. Nevertheless the father’s great love for the mother makes him a different kind of role model, one not based on gender expectations but on one’s ability to love.
The Mother
Both the father and the boy are in awe of the mother. As she nears the end of her pregnancy, “the mother was enormous and crying a lot. To the boy she seemed more beautiful than ever but tired” (72). The boy loves when she gives him attention, especially when she pulls him into fierce hugs after drinking alcohol. The mother suffered a burst appendix recently, and the boy remembers her feeling weak and ill on the couch. As a result, the boy constantly worries about the health of his mother.
The boy also feels distant from his mother, especially when the father bridges that distance by communicating with her in a secret coded language only they can understand. At the start of the story, the boy wants to understand their secret communication, finding it unbearable when he is left out. He demands to know what their secret is, and the mother gives a nod to the father, signaling that it is okay for the father to reveal her pregnancy. But as the father tells the boy that he will soon have a little brother or sister, he also reveals that the mother had a stillborn.
The boy also realizes that the father doesn’t completely understand his wife. The father is said to have a “special tone of incredulity he reserved for talking about this woman he had married” (56). The mother’s self-sufficiency and competence elude both the boy and the father. She is like the girl, both of whom are remarkably practical and elusive. The author writes:
The boy’s mother was hard-surfaced and fragile and yet capable of great and sudden intimacy that changed the girl’s hard surface with promise of a deeper understanding or perhaps lawlessness that he could not understand at all but that drew him like a magnet, like water of the night (67).
The boy sees that his admiration for the girl is tied to his admiration for his mother. Yet he also characterizes the mother as “arcane and foolish” when she tries to make conversation around the girl’s silence and exhaustion.
The Girl (Lyn)
When Lyn—referred to as “the girl” for most of the story—first arrives at the service station, she is starving and frail. Despite this, she becomes the most dominant character in the story. Not wanting to offend her, the others carefully monitor their actions and words around her. Her confidence and ability to survive mesmerize the boy. She does not modulate her speech the way the rest of the characters do whenever they try to express their feelings to each other. She bluntly states whatever she wants yet refuses to divulge any personal information. The boy learns only that her former guardian physically abused her, which is why she ran away.
Mainly, the boy is in thrall of the way the girl carries herself in the world. She has a practical knowledge of the world that allows her to survive. She bluntly diagnoses the main problem of the service station—the incompetence and alcoholism of the employee Ed Walsh—and her directness leaves the boy awestruck. In addition to growing taller than the father, the girl’s forceful personality demands attention. The boy sees that she is useful to the father in a way he could never be.
Despite her refusal to reciprocate his feelings of admiration, the girl’s presence releases the boy from much of his alienation. Her roar allows him to roar. However, the girl remains a mystery at the end, her fate unknown. While the boy revels in a memory of the two of them walking down the street together, he knows little of where her journey takes her. In time, the girl becomes anonymous. The boy forgets her name. This otherness allows her to retain her mystery, as her silence speaks louder than her roar.
