“We’ve all lost our children”: Accidental Death, Vengeful Justice, and American Father in Russell Banks’s The Sweet Hereafter

Abstract

Russell Banks (1940~), a prolific and bestselling American writer, is widely acclaimed for his realistic and bruising characters who are locked in class and race conflict and attempt to escape the brutal existence and a pervasive anxiety about money. Indeed, his novels have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success. In his sixth novel, The Sweet Hereafter, revolving around a school bus accident, likewise, Banks reveals the various ways ordinary American individuals and their community as a whole react to the tragic event. This paper examines Banks's portrayal of individual healing and communal redemption in terms of guilt, blame, justice, and recovery. In The Sweet Hereafter which raises the uncomfortable question ‘who is to blame for a tragic accident causing the loss of innocent children?’ Banks's unique, realistic, and limited narrative structure with the perspectives of four individual narrators such as a school bus driver, an eyewitness, a New York City lawyer, and a fourteen-year-old survivor successfully makes it possible for the reader to fully understand how differently individuals cope with grief and loss from the tragedy and their lives can be changed.