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

Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 3 Summary: “The New House”

The narrator’s father has commissioned a modern house in the new part of town. The narrator visits the construction site every day after school and plays on the scaffolding. He compares his memory of the unfinished house to a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti called “The Palace at 4 A.M.” and includes a lengthy quote from the artist about the sculpture’s creation.

The narrator relates a memory of seeing snow falling through the unfinished attic. But he immediately questions the veracity of the memory. He asserts that memory is really a form of storytelling and that in talking about the past we necessarily tell lies.

One day, while playing on the scaffolding, he sees Cletus Smith standing in the unfinished house and invites him to come up and play. They start meeting there every day after school.

The narrator is a thin, bookish boy who doesn’t like sports. Older boys at school pick on him. A friend of his mother invites him over for a weekend to play with her son. The boys are near in age but much different in personality. The slightly older boy is everything the narrator would like to be. They seem to be getting along nicely but the older boy keeps calling the narrator a “sissy” under his breath. The narrator is confused and hurt by this experience.

The friendship with Cletus is especially meaningful to the narrator because of his difficulty in making friends with other boys. Cletus enjoys playing with him and doesn’t tease him. But the narrator never tells Cletus about his mother’s death; he has learned to be silent about certain topics. Every evening they part saying “So long” and “See you tomorrow.” The night before the murder is their final parting.

The murderer is Cletus’s father, Clarence Smith. The boys have never discussed the reasons for Cletus’s recent arrival in town, the divorce of his parents, or his mother’s relationship with his father’s former best friend, Lloyd Wilson.

The narrator explains that Clarence gave up farming and moved in with his parents after the divorce. Lloyd was considering moving away too and confided in his brothers that he feared for his life. The narrator, in the present day, knows these details because he has been researching the murder, decades after the crime took place. The research has revealed that his memories of the murder were inaccurate.

Contemporaneous newspaper reports detail the early search for Clarence, which turns up only rumors and mysterious incidents. The paper addresses the recent separation of Lloyd Wilson from his wife and the marital troubles of the Smiths. A photo of Lloyd and Clarence together appears alongside a testament to the close friendship of the men. The narrator notes that they look like brothers.

The newspaper accounts raise many questions for the narrator. But details in the reporting start to connect Fern Smith with Lloyd Wilson. James Walker, the new tenant at Clarence’s former house, tells a reporter that Clarence visited the property and acted strangely. James discovers Clarence’s overcoat, leading investigators to believe that he slept in the barn the night before the murder.

The paper reports on rumors that Clarence drowned and quotes police discounting that theory. But 15 days after the murder, Clarence’s body is found in the gravel pit. He died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Cletus is called upon by the sheriff to identify the guns used in the murder and suicide.

The narrator reflects on how much Cletus’s life changed from the time they said goodbye at the scaffolding to the moment he saw his father’s weapons at the police station.

Chapter 4 Summary: “In the School Corridor”

The narrator distrusts his memory of what happened to Cletus after his father’s suicide. He imagines what he would have thought about Lloyd’s relationship with Fern. He knows he was intrigued by the murdered man’s missing ear. He tries to imagine what Cletus is going through, but he can’t.

The narrator’s family moves into their new house. It is very comfortable but the narrator misses playing on the scaffolding. His father travels most of the time. He grows closer to his stepmother Grace and her many family members, who live nearby.

Grace sometimes hosts drinking parties, which carry an illicit connotation in the Prohibition Era. The narrator feels trepidation around these adult gatherings, but they stop occurring when Grace and her friends enter middle age. Grace’s jovial brothers embrace the narrator as a member of the family and their outgoing personalities are a notable contrast to the family dynamics he’s used to.

The narrator discovers masturbation, without knowing exactly what it is. He doesn’t connect it with sex or, more specifically, with the adulterous passions of Lloyd and Fern.

His father is promoted to the Chicago office of his insurance firm. Grace doesn’t want to leave Lincoln and her large family. They move in March, but the narrator stays behind to finish the school year. He stays with Grace’s mother and shares a room with her brother Ted, who treats him kindly. When he moves to Chicago, Ted and another brother drive him there, buy him a meal, and give him money. He is struck by the generosity and joyfulness of these men.

In Chicago, he has a summer job as a filing clerk in his father’s office. He’s taken in by a group of neighborhood boys who accept him after finding out he’s not Jewish. When he starts school in the fall he is impressed by the size of the school and the variety of after-school clubs. He finds more acceptance than he did in Lincoln.

During the first week of school, he sees Cletus walking down the hallway toward him. They pass by each other without speaking. The narrator, in the present, wonders why he didn’t say anything to Cletus. He speculates that it was because he didn’t know how to address Clarence’s crime. He imagines what he could have tried to say but also realizes how little he can understand what Cletus has been through. He decides that the best he could have done would have been to walk up alongside Cletus and not say anything.

Chapters 3-4 Analysis

These chapters further develop the major theme of Memory and Fiction. The narrator contends that memory is a type of storytelling that causes us to lie about the past. This is the key to the book’s metanarrative structure. The narrator uses memory and imagination to generate a fictional past, and the reader is warned of its untruth. Yet, the story is filled with intimate autobiographical details and documented facts from the historical record. Even memory’s falsehood is true: Maxwell’s faulty memory of the real-life murder inspired the novel. These paradoxes of a self-aware text show why this is a prime example of metafiction.

Important features of the narrator’s characterization emerge in Chapter 3. He is a loner, he’s bullied, he doesn’t like sports, and he’s called a “sissy.” A bookish child immersed in grief is maturing into a studious outsider without many friends. Cletus has reasons for being an outsider, unbeknownst to the narrator. The boys’ personalities develop in the context of transitional family structures and temporary living arrangements. They form a connection without knowing these deeper parallels. They have much in common, and they both need a friend. This fact adds to the pain of their impending permanent separation. The moment when they say goodbye for the last time, believing they’ll see each other the next day, is the turning point of the story, which Maxwell signals in the title of the book.

Violence and tragedy open a chasm between them. When the boys have a chance encounter in the corridors of their Chicago high school, they instinctively behave like strangers. The narrator speculates that Cletus must have become a different person, an older person, due to his father’s actions. He acts on this belief in the corridor. This incident induces the lifelong regret that the narrator referred to in Chapter 2. Atoning for the failure to speak to Cletus is his stated purpose in writing this book. The narrator’s motivation is identical to Maxwell’s, who still physically winced when remembering this real-life incident over 50 years later.