From Abraham and Isaac to Bob Slocum and My Boy: Why Fathers Kill Their Sons

Abstract

Allen Tate has said that the great subject of American literature is the of the personality.' He explains that disintegration is an imbalance among the faculties of will, reason, and feeling that results in a zombie-like state in which consciousness is walled up, barely alive in its own dead body. Bob Slocum, in Joseph Heller's Something Happened, admits to a condition very much like this life-in-death state: my middle years, I have exchanged the position of the fetus for the position of a corpse. When I go to sleep now, it is no longer on my side with my knees tucked up securely against my abdomen, and my thumb near my mouth. I lie on my back with my hands clasped across my chest decorously like a cadaver and my face pointed straight up toward the ceiling.2 Bob Slocum's disintegration is marked by the benign murder of his son, which places Something Happened among those works that treat our great subject by depicting fathers destroying sons in a symbolic rejection of the child's promise of renewal, of reintegration for the father, and by extension for the family and the culture. In these works the death of the son is a challenging reversal of the AbrahamIsaac story, particularly apt for the American experience, which from its seventeenth-century roots identified with the Old Testament idea of a chosen people led by God's representative to a new land and a new national identity. A brief look at some of the works that treat our great subject will illustrate by comparison how apocalyptic Heller's novel is. Hawthorne's Roger Malvin's Burial, published in 1832, is one of the first, and to