Unhappy Marriages
The dominant motif of the stories in the collection titled A Multitude of Sins is explicitly addressed in the opening line of the first story: “This was at a time when my marriage was still happy.” Not a single marriage told in the stories within are at the moment of climax anywhere near to being a happy union. The stories are really only tangibly connected through the shared portraits of miserable marriages.
A Multitude of Sin
A much more appropriate title for the collection would be A Multitude of Sin, singular instead of plural. While there are, admittedly, a plethora of minor ethical violations, only one of the Ten Commandments is routinely violated throughout the collection: adultery. It is especially appropriate to identify infidelity as recurring motif rather than a constant theme, however, because marital affairs are approached differently with each new occurrence.
The Dog
“Puppy” is a story, for instance, in which the infidelity of the wife is merely assumed—or feared—by the husband without the narrative ever confirming these suspicions. Maybe she has fooled around or then again maybe she hasn’t. The abandoned puppy which has been left on their doorstep becomes a symbol of the lack of certainty which has come to characterize this relationship.
The Dead-Not-Dead Raccoon
“Under the Radar” is arguably the story’s most vicious portrait of an unhappy marriage. There is no ambiguity here: the very first line of the story has the wife explicitly admitting an affair to her husband. Things go rapidly downhill from there, including an incident in which a car drives over a racoon and appears to kill it. Only it turns out not to be quite dead yet and the adulterous wife and husband can only watch as it struggles to crawl toward death with dignity with only half a working body. Eventually, the husband locates only a small circle of blood with no sign of the raccoon anywhere. Shortly thereafter, he will find himself in roughly the same state as the raccoon courtesy of another car in which his wife sits behind the steering wheel. The logical conclusion is that the raccoon symbolizes the husband, but it is much more expansive than that. The raccoon symbolizes this marriage in particular and, by association, possibly the entire institution itself.
The Tassled Hermes Scarf
The story “Reunion” offers yet another take on the motif of infidelity: it is a first-person account by a man about his chance meeting with the husband of the wife who was cheating on him with the narrator. By this point, that affair had long since ended. He proceeds to relate the circumstances of that ending in which the husband found his wife in a hotel room with the narrator, knocked him around a little bit, and sent him on his way. In the process, the narrator not only lost a lover, but also the brown silk Hermes scarf with tassels which was a gift from his mother who described as the nicest thing she’d ever seen. The scarf becomes the collection’s primary symbol of all the things which are lost during an affair that ultimately gains nothing of comparable value.
Note: as of 2022, on its website, Hermes scarves were selling at prices ranging from a low of $355 to highs in excess of $800.
