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.
Themes
Learning to Express Oneself Through “Roaring”
The parents warn the boy not to judge the girl for what they perceive to be her low class and lack of privilege. They assume her loud, coarse language shocks the boy, especially because the family communicates via difficult-to-read signals: quiet gestures, indirect fragments, and vague statements that the boy struggles to decipher and that the parents expect him to understand. The parents rarely fight, and when they do, the boy retreats into his closet.
When the girl joins the household, she does not try to adjust to their quiet ways. The parents fail to understand that her loudness is exactly what fascinates the boy, combined with her ability to maneuver in the world. They don’t see that the boy is in thrall of the girl’s ability to “roar.” When the girl identifies the problem at the service station—namely, the useless Ed Walsh—her bold directness amazes the boy. Yet the parents ignore her advice. They find her voice jolting and uncomfortable. The boy, on the other hand, needs to know how the girl speaks the way she does. To him, her voice reveals another way to interact with the world, especially because he is usually timid and wary of conflict. The girl thus shows him the power of one’s voice.
The parents, however, judge this roar as a marker of low class. While they urge the boy not to be a snob, there is an undercurrent of anxiety in their need to distinguish themselves as not “low.” This is especially true of the mother. The boy absorbs some of these class concerns, symbolized most distinctly by the girl’s roars. Nevertheless, he sees the value of roaring no matter how uncomfortable it makes people. At just eight years old, he is tired of the veiled, indirect communications of his family that are exhausting to decipher. He sees that the ability to speak without fear allows him freedom from a life of restraint.
The Failures of the Father
While the boy loves his father very much, he is skeptical of the man’s ability to succeed in the world. He sees his father’s fingernail, mangled by factory machinery, a sign of the man’s vulnerability. At the beginning of the story, the boy wants his father to solve a problem as a man, even though the boy doesn’t yet know what the problem is. The father spends much of his time engaged in failed moneymaking schemes.
In general, the men in the story are incompetent and unable to do their jobs. Dr. Mackey misdiagnoses the mother’s burst appendix and performs some unknown other operation to “fix” the mother, which causes her to laugh at him. When they call the doctor about the girl, he goes back and forth in his advice. In addition, Ed Walsh is, as the girl says, “useless as a male tit” (66). Her crude characterization of Walsh extends to all the men in the story. Meanwhile, the mother and the girl are far more useful as a bookkeeper and a mechanic, respectively.
The boy worries he will follow in the footsteps of these dubious male role models. He doubts his abilities to interact with customers, preferring to hide in the old broken-down Rambler. This helpless point of view traps him until he meets the girl, whose lack of helplessness fascinates him. Moreover, her strength and competence create a stark point of contrast to the father’s failures.
Escaping Fear and Death Through Another’s Eyes
The boy’s parents make him extraordinarily anxious about death and the fragility of human bodies. The scarring on his father’s fingernail rivets him, showing how factory machinery can mangle the body. The mother’s illness and burst appendix make him realize his parents are not safe from harm. He marvels at their beauty and great size compared to himself but also knows this physicality is temporary.
Ironically, when he learns that his mother had a stillborn who would have been named Jim, the boy is not moved to contemplate the ephemeral mortality of his would-be brother. Instead, he feels an intimacy with the brother who never had a chance at life. In death, his brother becomes more alive as the imagines him to be skilled and competent in ways that the boy never could be. The boy imagines Jim as a hard worker who jokes with the customers and knows the right way to talk to Ed. As he hides in the Rambler, the boy effectively disappears and embraces the ephemeral nature of life which he so fears.
When the girl arrives, her ability to navigate life amazes the boy. He no longer wants to be ephemeral. His experience of the tenuousness of existence transforms into a desire to be understood by another. He wants the girl to pay attention to him the way he pays attention to her, as he feels this will help him mark his place in the world.
