in his mind whether the snake is poisonous and whether to wash the slime from his hand, deciding finally in the negative. He carries back to the school a locust shell he has found on the way. The snake, which seemingly cannot be killed, suggests both ineradicable evil and, in its victimization, Christ; the locust shell, which he holds next to his heart, seems to represent suffering in a purer form. Richard’s dive into the water and subsequent resurfacing obviously symbolize his own “death” and “resurrection” in this Christian Holy Week.

Some critics have noted the influence of James Joyce on this novella. Certainly Richard resembles in certain ways the youngprotagonists of some of Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) stories as well as Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Attracted by religious mysteries and artifacts, Richard wishes to appropriate them for his own purposes. He senses the conflict of religion with the world, evinces distaste for the practices of the latter, and hopes to fashion a life that blends the best of both. While Richard’s appropriation of religious rite and doctrine is less consciously the artist’s than is that of Stephen Dedalus, the reader senses that Richard’s individualistic spirituality will inevitably bring him into a Joycean conflict with conservative religious practice.

A Death in the Family

Since The Morning Watch, despite its provocatively ambiguous conflict between the world and the spirit, is somewhat labored and precious, and since Agee’s short stories were few and insignificant, his reputation as an important American novelist rests primarily on one book that he did not quite complete before his early death, A Death in the Family. As he left it, the story begins at the supper table of the Follet household in Knoxville, Tennessee, in about 1915 and ends just after Jay Follet’s funeral on the third day following. Agee had written a short descriptive essay, “Knoxville: Summer 1915” (which makes an appropriate preface to the novel), and six additional sections, which together make up about one-fifth the length of the narrative.

Although all the six scenes (as they will be termed here) pertain to times prior to that of the main story, it remains unclear where Agee intended to place them or whether he would have used stream-of-consciousness flashbacks, a story-within-a-story technique, or perhaps another method suggested by his cinematic experience to incorporate them. Surely he intended to use them, for they illuminate and enrich the death story despite the absence of any formal linkage among them or collectively to the narrative. The editorial decision to print three of them after each of the first two parts of the three-part narrative seems as logical as any other way under the circumstances.

The novel has no single protagonist. Jay Follet, strong, tall, and taciturn, is described most specifically, at one point being compared to President Abraham Lincoln, although Follet is apparently more handsome. Last seen alive one-third of the way through the narrative, he appears in five of the six scenes and remains the main object of the other characters’ thoughts in the last two parts of the narrative. At various stages, each important family member reflects on him: his wife, Mary; his son, Rufus, his brother, Ralph; Mary’s parents, Joel and Catherine; Mary’s aunt, Hannah, and her brother, Andrew; and even Jay and Mary’s three-year-old daughter, also named Catherine. Agee focuses most frequently on Rufus and Mary.

No point of view outside the family circle intrudes, and, except on two occasions when the six-year-old Rufus interacts with neighborhood children outside, attention is focused on family members exclusively. Throughout the novel, Agee juxtaposes the tensions and tendernesses of domestic life. The reader is constantly made to feel not only how much the family members love one another but also how abrasive they can be. Recognizing that a family does not succeed automatically, Agee portrays a continual struggle against external divisive pressures and selfishness within.

Jay and Mary’s marriage has withstood a number of strains. First of all, their origins differ greatly. Mary’s people are the citified, well-educated Lynches; the Follets are Tennessee mountain folk. The couple’s ability to harmonize their differences is exemplified in the second of the six scenes. Rufus notes that when his parents sing together, his father interprets music flexibly, “like a darky,” while his mother sings true and clear but according to the book. Rufus particularly admires his father’s sense of rhythm. Sometimes, the boy observes, his mother tries to sing Jay’s way and he hers, but they soon give up and return to what is natural for themselves.

Jay’s father, who indirectly causes Jay’s death, is one point of difference. Mary’s antipathy to him is known to all the Follets, but even Jay realizes that his likable father is weak of character. When Jay’s brother calls and informs him that their father is very ill, Jay wastes no time in preparing to go to him, despite his suspicion that the unreliable Ralph has greatly exaggerated the danger. It is on his return trip, after learning that his father is all right, that a mechanical defect in Jay’s car causes the crash that kills him instantly.

Jay’s drinking problem, a Follet weakness, has also distressed his wife, and Jay has vowed to kill himself if he ever gets drunk again. In one of the scenes, Rufus, aware that whiskey is a sore point between his parents, accompanies his father when he stops at a tavern, and it appears that he has overcome his habit of excess, but his reputation has spread. Both the man who finds Jay’s body and the children who later taunt Rufus on the street corner attribute his accident to drunken driving, and Mary has to fight off the temptation to consider the possibility.

Religion is another divisive issue. Jay does not appear to be a denominational Christian, while Mary is, like Agee’s own mother, a fervent Episcopalian. The men on both sides of the family are either skeptics or thoroughgoing unbelievers. A devotee of Thomas Hardy’s fiction, Mary’s father, Joel, has little use for piety or what he calls “churchiness.” Although he originally disapproved of Mary’s marriage to Jay, he has come to terms with Jay, whom he views as a counterweight to Mary’s religiosity. Mary’s brother carries on open warfare with the Christian God; when Andrew first hears of Jay’s accident, Mary senses that he is mentally rehearsing a speech about the folly of belief in a benevolent deity. Even young Rufus is a budding skeptic. Told that God has let his father “go to sleep,” he ferrets out the details and concludes that the concussion he has heard about, “not God,” has put his father to sleep. When he hears that his father will wake up at the Final Judgment, he wonders what good that is. The women accept the inscrutable as God’s will, but the men take an agnostic stance and fear the influence of the church. Father Jackson, the most unpleasant person in the novel, ministers to Mary in her bereavement. Rufus quickly decides that the priest’s power is malevolent and that, were his real father present, the false father would not be allowed into his home.

Some hours after the confirmation of Jay’s death, Mary feels his presence in the room, and although Andrew and Joel will not concede any kind of spiritual visitation, they acknowledge that they too felt “something.” Later, Andrew tells Rufus of an event he considers “miraculous”: the settling of a butterfly on Jay’s coffin in the grave and the creature’s subsequent flight, high into the sunlight. The men’s unbelief, then, is not positivistic; they recognize the possibility of a realm beyond the natural order, but they bitterly oppose the certified spiritual agent, Father Jackson, as too self-assured and quick to condemn.

To counter the estrangements brought on by cultural and religious conflicts in the family, reconciliations dot the narrative. Rufus senses periodic estrangements from his father and then joyful feelings of unity. Jay frequently feels lonely, even homesick. Crossing the river between Knoxville and his old home, he feels restored. To go home is impracticable, bound up with a vanished childhood. In one of the scenes, the family visits Rufus’s great-great-grandmother, taking a long, winding journey into the hills and into the past. It is apparent that none of the younger generations of Follets has gone to see the old woman in a long time. Rufus, who has never been there, comes home in a way impossible to his father. The old woman, more than one hundred years old, barely acknowledges any of her numerous offspring, but she clasps Rufus, the fifth-generation descendant, who is joyful to her. On other occasions, Jay, by imaginative identification with Rufus, can feel as if he is his “own self” again.

Mary also feels alternate waves of friendship with and estrangement from her father. He, in turn, has a wife with whom communication is difficult because of her deafness. When Catherine cannot hear her husband, she seldom asks him to repeat himself, as if fearful of exasperating him. In this way, she is insulated from his unbelief. Although they talk little, they communicate by gestures and physical closeness. Agee shows him taking her elbow to help her over a curb and carefully steering her up the street toward their home. Rufus and his father are usually silent on their walks; they communicate by sitting together on a favorite rock and watching passersby.

Much of the talk following Jay’s death is irritable and nerve-shattering. Andrew dwells thoughtlessly on the one-chance-in-a-million nature of Jay’s accident, for which his father rebukes him. Mary implores Andrew to have mercy and then hysterically begs his forgiveness, upon which her aunt censures her for unwarranted humility. Both Mary and Andrew are enduring crises, however, and are hardly responsible for what they say. She is resisting the temptation to despair of God’s mercy; he is trying to come to terms with a possibly meaningless universe. Andrew communicates best through service; during the hours of distress, he is unfailingly helpful.

The truest communication exists between Jay and Mary. When he is not silent, he can be sullen or wrathful. As he prepares to set forth on his journey to his father’s, Mary dreads the “fury and profanity” she can expect if, for example, the car will not start, but this sometimes harsh husband stops in the bedroom to recompose their bed so it will look comfortable and inviting when she returns to it. She disapproves of his drinking strong coffee, but she makes him some very strong coffee on this occasion because she knows he will appreciate it. By dozens of such unobtrusive deeds, Jay and Mary express their love, which prevails over the numerous adverse circumstances and personal weaknesses that threaten it.

Long before he began work on A Death in the Family, Agee expressed his intention to base a literary work on his father’s death. The eventual novel is thus deeply meditated and very personal. At the same time, it attains universality by means of its painstaking precision. In the Follets can be seen any family that has striven to harmonize potentially divisive differences or has answered a sudden tragedy courageously. As in loving families generally, the tensions do not disappear. At the end, Andrew, for the first time in his life, invites Rufus to walk with him. Sensing the negative feelings in his uncle, Rufus nevertheless is afraid to ask him about them. Walking home with this man who can never replicate his father but who will fill as much of the void as possible, Rufus comes to terms with his father’s death in the silence that in Agee’s fiction communicates beyond the power of words. In this reconstruction of his own most momentous childhood experience, Agee portrays the most difficult reconciliation of all.