Nostalgia for Glories of the Past
The glory days of the family are long gone and the loss has translated over the years into a deterioration of identity. Cheever uses imagery to makes this connection that the present has become a disappointment of the failure to realize the dreams and ambitions of the past: a wedding dress and old football jersey from the past chosen to wear in the present, for instance. A contrasting parallel is then drawn by the attempt to diminish the success of the youngest member of the clan—achieved by moving far away from the poisonous atmosphere of the others—through a pointed insistence on referring to him his childhood nicknames in a symbolic attempt to bring him into the present by paradoxically freezing him in the past.
Cain and Abel Myth
At the heart of the exploration of familial tension is the situation of the story, which enables Cheever to explore the persistence of the mythic narrative that pits a “good” brother against a “bad” brother. The translation over the millennia into a more complicated moral universe far from duality of the Old Testament invests this Cain and Abel story with ambiguity, however: the death blow is symbolic rather than literal and it is the the “Abel” who is actually subject to violent assault rather than Cain.
Patrician Illusion
The nostalgia for family identity of the past is presented with enough ambiguity that it may actually be mere another manifestation of willful self-delusion among the Pommeroys that their upper class status and supposed good breeding has engendered a special quality in the lineage that makes them more special, if not necessarily better than most. It is a strain that is hardly limited to a single family, of course; such a view is rampant among not just the geographical home of Pommeroy, but many of the families at the center of Cheever’s fiction. His insight into the commonality patrician feelings of superiority as well as the inevitable revelation of it illusory qualities has made him one of the foremost chroniclers of this particular strata of American society.
