So Long, See You Tomorrow

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1980

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-9

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Background

Authorial Context: William Maxwell

So Long, See You Tomorrow is inspired by Maxwell’s childhood experiences in Lincoln, Illinois. The town is named after Abraham Lincoln, who practiced law there before running for president. During the author’s childhood, Lincoln was a farming community with a small commercial sector. The family lived there until Maxwell’s early high school years when they relocated to Chicago.

Illinois is a recurring setting throughout Maxwell’s fiction and, despite living most of his adult life in New York, he is an essential Midwestern writer. Many of the events, settings, and characters in So Long, See You Tomorrow—including the central murder—are drawn from real life. Numerous names, dates, and locations are unchanged. The narrator is a barely fictional proxy for Maxwell and shares key biographical details with the author, elaborated in Barbara Burkhardt’s biography William Maxwell: A Literary Life (University of Illinois Press, 2005).

Maxwell’s mother died in an influenza epidemic two days after giving birth to his younger brother. This loss defined his childhood and shaped his life. His grieving father (an insurance salesman) paced around the house, followed by his sons. His father later remarried a woman named Grace McGrath whose jocular brothers befriended him. The family had a new house built on Park Place in Lincoln and Maxwell played in the construction while it was being erected. He was joined on the scaffolding by a school friend whose father later committed a murder and then killed himself. These are important plot points in the novel as well as autobiographical facts about the author.

Literary Context: Autobiographical Novels and Metafiction

One autobiographical fact that bears heavily on So Long, See You Tomorrow is Maxwell’s inaccurate memories of the murder. He originally wrote about the crime in a story rejected by the New Yorker. In that story, which he believed to be factual, Clarence catches Lloyd in bed with his wife Fern and shoots them both. He later researched the killing and discovered that his recollections were false. The realization of memory’s unreality is the bridge between the techniques Maxwell seamlessly employs in the novel.

So Long, See You Tomorrow is autobiographical fiction. This genre of literature blends memoir and invention to create a hybrid form rich in memories yet not tethered to the rigorous fact-checking of nonfiction writing. Many of literature’s greatest writers have worked in this genre. Countless others have incorporated personal histories into fictional works. Some authors have prompted scandals by labeling autobiographical novels as memoirs. James Frey’s best-selling A Million Little Pieces, for instance, caused an uproar when crucial details in the narrative were debunked. It could have been avoided by marketing the book as autobiographical fiction.

Metafictions are self-referential narratives that address the act of storytelling within the story. Fiction is the subject of these fictions, which interrogates the narrative processes within the narrative. In So Long, See You Tomorrow, the narrator describes memory as “a form of storytelling” and asserts that “in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw” (27). Before embarking on his story of the murder, the narrator advises that “[i]f any part of the following mixture of truth and fiction strikes the reader as unconvincing, he has my permission to disregard it” (56). These quotes are definitive examples of metafiction: The narrator is calling attention to the story and self-consciously questioning how fiction relates to reality.

By merging these two techniques Maxwell crafts an autobiographical metafiction. The work draws on his personal history in which storytelling and fiction are verifiable facts.

Socioeconomic Context: Tenant Farming and Urbanization

Tenant farming was an economic structure in agricultural production common in the US in the early 20th century. It forms the backdrop of the story and informs the attitudes of the central characters. A tenant farmer is given a place to live and land to farm in exchange for labor. The property belongs to a landowner who often lives elsewhere and is paid from the farming profits according to a contractual agreement. The tenants often own some assets, like Clarence’s livestock in the novel.

The book makes clear that the distinction between owners and tenants entails social and class ramifications. The narrator says Cletus is sensitive to “the emotion of ownership” (63). The narrator, too, observes the social inequality of landowners (like his father) and tenants (like Cletus’s father). These class discrepancies overlap with perceived hierarchies of town and country. Fern Smith was raised in town and is visibly disappointed to arrive in the country. The narrator’s father is eager to move from the outskirts to the center of Lincoln, and from there to the metropolis of Chicago.

The narrator’s (and Maxwell’s) trajectory from a small town to a big city reflects the historical trend of urbanization. During the years when the novel is set, America’s population became majority urban-dwelling for the first time. The trend continued and now an overwhelming majority of Americans live in urban areas. Agriculture grew increasingly industrialized as rural communities shrank and landholdings were consolidated. Today, some Midwestern landowners hold thousands of acres of property and wield considerable political influence.