What did he mean – good friends?
When the sheriff asked Arnold whether he and his brother were “good friends”, the boy was puzzled. “What did he mean – good friends?” Eugie was “his brother” and he “wanted to be with Eugie more than anybody else”, but “he couldn’t say they had been good friends.” Not to mention, that their friendship or lack of it had nothing to do with the fact that his brother was dead. All these interrogations, mocking remarks of his uncle and his mother’s silence frightened the boy even more. He had yet to realize that his Eugie would never return.
It’s us who ain’t reasonable. If we’d of shot our brother, we’d come of runnin’ back to the house, like a baby.
It seemed that Uncle Andy decided to taunt his younger nephew. He liked Eugene a lot, so it was a great loss for him. Although he knew that the tragedy happened accidentally, he still thought of Arnold as a monster. The man says that they are different from Arnold, for they are “ain’t reasonable” and – unlike Arnold, they would run “back to the house, like a baby”, if they would commit something as terrible as Arnold’s crime. The truth is that they are unreasonable, for they gave a rifle to a nine-year-old and didn’t explain the importance of gun safety rules.
I didn’t want nothing.
It is always difficult to cope with rejection. When shock wears down and Arnold finds enough strengths to talk about the tragedy, he learns that he has no one to talk to. The boy needs his family more than he would probably need them in his whole life, but they refuse to give him a chance to explain. So, when his mother asks him what he wanted to tell her, his answer is, “I didn’t want nothing.” This quote shows that to lose one’s trust is the easiest thing in the world.
