Isolation
The living conditions of the poor sharecropper family who are the protagonists of the novel is bleak and despairing. Right from the opening paragraphs the author works in metaphor to develop a heightened sense of the isolation they not only feel but are intended to feel:
“The white man who owned the vast endless fields had scattered the cabins of his Negro sharecroppers far apart, like flyspecks on a whitewashed ceiling.”
“The road which passed the cabin lay like a thread dropped on a patchwork quilt.”
“cowardice is the mother of cruelty”
This particular metaphor is not the invention of the author, but is taken from a quote by French philosopher Michel de Montaigne. Within the context of the novel it is not just the content of the quote as it relates to the themes of the story that is important, but how the quote is discovered. The book ends on an uplifting note as the boy retrieves a discarded book containing a collection of philosophical essays from the garbage and embarks upon the ambition—very much not an act of cowardice at the time—to pursue an education.
Sounder’s Sound
Sounder is well-named, apparently. He derives his name—the only member of the family with a name ever spoken—from this propensity for letting anyone within hearing distance know he had successfully trapped his prey.
“But there was no price that could be put on Sounder’s voice. It came out of the great chest cavity and broad jaws as though it had bounced off the walls of a cave.”
Old Time Religion
Religious faith fills the household of the sharecropper family. The boy is especially captivated by David and Goliath, but he is equally well informed of appropriately metaphorical New Testament lends of the little guy beating the biggest guy of all:
“Maybe if she laid him on the porch and put some soft rags under him tonight, he might rise from the dead, like Lazarus did in a meetin’-house story.”
Isolation Breeds Curiosity
The coerced if not enforced isolation of the family serves a larger purpose for the landowner. Alienation from others breeds dependence. And dependence is power. But isolation experienced too long can also breed curiosity and rebellion, and this foreshadowed in the boy’s response to the isolation of his circumstances:
“The boy was allowed to go as far as he wanted to on the road. But the younger children couldn’t go past the pine clump toward the big house and the town…Almost no one passed on the road in winter except to buy flour at the store far down the road…Even in summer a speck on the horizon was a curiosity.”
