The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

With his shifty eyes, gravelly voice, and perpetual sneer, Claude is uncomplicated by compassion or charity. He drives the plot with his depthless villainy.

The downfall of the Sawtelle family begins with Claude’s arrival at the farm after his career in the navy. Although initially readers do not know it, Claude is in the Prologue. An officer stationed in South Korea, Claude negotiates the purchase of a potent poison after watching without emotion the toxin kill a stray dog. In this summary moment, Claude defines his character. He embodies evil. Jealous of his quietly competent and business-savvy brother, Claude schemes to steal everything his brothers earns, including the lucrative kennel business and Trudy. In coldly staging the death of his brother, an act of fratricide that only young Edgar guesses, Claude reveals that his villainy knows no bounds.

Claude methodically slides into Trudy’s world, claiming her as his wife and his brother’s farm as his empire. Reptilian in his morality and calculating in his duplicity, Claude, though physically similar to his brother, is nothing like Gar. Where Gar is careful, diligent, and dependable, Claude is a careless yet charismatic charmer who is driven by his appetites for money, sex, alcohol, and tobacco. Beyond the profits they generate, he is only casually interested in the dogs. As if accepting the consequences of his treachery, Claude surrenders to his fate after glimpsing in the swirling flames of the burning barn the shadowy ghost of the brother he killed. 

Trudy Sawtelle is difficult to assess. In a novel with more than fifty chapters, only five are told from the perspective of Trudy, Gar’s widow and Edgar’s mother. She is raised in the foster care system, which might account for her commitment to her family. From Edgar’s perspective, her actions after Gar’s death are distressing. She begins the relationship with Claude just weeks after her husband’s mysterious death. Content to accept the coroner’s guess that an aneurysm killed Gar, Trudy never pursues a serious inquiry into the cause of death. She defends Claude as her source of comfort and security to her son who is convinced his uncle is responsible for Gar’s death. Although Trudy reveals her resilience in the first months after her husband’s sudden death when the operations of the farm fall to her and to her son, she dismisses even the idea that Claude may be villainous. That willingness to invest unexamined faith in her brother-in-law brings out Trudy’s low moment as a character, when she commands a terrified Edgar to “get out into the field. Find a place to hide” (326).

To her credit, when Edgar returns from his exile, Trudy rises to the defense of her son. The mother and child reunion is touching and heartfelt. When she coolly negotiates with the sheriff whose eyes are burning from the quicklime, making she Edgar is safe before she gives him water, Trudy reveals the heroic and uncompromising maternal instinct. Ultimately, with Gar murdered, Edgar poisoned, and Claude burned alive in the barn fire, Trudy alone survives to bear the emotional weight of the family tragedy. Readers leave her collapsed in the grass outside the barn, her “eyes fixed on the open door and the flames that thrust through them” (558)—doors from which her son and her lover will never emerge.