62 pages • 2 hours read
Joyce Carol OatesWe Were the Mulvaneys
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1996A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 29-33Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The Huntsman”
Chapter 29 Summary: “The Accomplice”
Judd thinks of himself as his brother’s accomplice, because in reply to Patrick’s request, he realizes: “Whatever he wants I’ll do it. If he wants me to pull the trigger myself I’ll do it” (256). He believes Patrick is the only Mulvaney who can exact revenge “as a coolly premeditated act from which the perpetrator would walk away unscathed” (256). Michael has become rude and aggressive to Corinne, but when Judd shares his fears with Patrick, he replies, “our father is just a casualty” (260). Michael spirals into paranoia, hiring and firing lawyers to right the wrongs done to him, “a man with no hope” (261).
Judd and Corinne visit Marianne: “When Marianne and Mom hugged they began to cry in a soundless way you’d almost mistake for laughter” (262). They have lunch with the rest of the commune, who are friendly and inquisitive, and Corinne is “in her element” (264). Judd sees a bruise on Corinne’s jaw, and is scared that his father has done it. Corinne initially gets on well with Abelove, the director of the co-op, but when she feels he is touching upon private family matters, she says, “You are a stranger to me, Mr.—oh, that silly made-up name!” (270). Leaving, she also becomes cruelly cold to Marianne.
Chapter 30 Summary: “Brothers”
Patrick shares with Judd his plan: to abduct Zachary and take him somewhere “where whatever was to happen would happen” (272). He still has not decided what he will do to Zach, but he needs Judd to get him the gun. Judd feels ecstatic to be so included in Patrick’s plans: “I have a brother! I am a brother! This is what it is—to be brothers!” (274).
Chapter 31 Summary: “Crossing Over”
Over the winter, Patrick changes and becomes restless. He starts to run, believing “his bouts of running, sometimes twice daily, were but extensions of consciousness” (275). He calls the Lundt home, pretending to be one of Zach’s friends, and finds out that Zach will be home for Easter holidays. He loses focus on his studies, changing his research topics and endlessly meditating on the metaphysical context of his ideas, so that Professor Herring, who has been his champion, assigns him a new advisor. One night he wakes up from a nightmare of drowning in what reminds him of a bog off Route 58. He confesses to Judd, “Always at the back of my mind I see Marianne—abused, vilified, exiled even by her family” (284).
Chapter 32 Summary: “The Handshake”
Judd hopes that maybe Patrick is only trying to test him with his plans. However, on April 16, at noon, they meet at a spot Patrick has chosen. Judd, who has brought the gun, is shocked by Patrick’s appearance: “he looked older, scarcely recognizable” (287), with a beard and sunglasses. He hands the gun to his brother, who gives him a location to retrieve it the next day. Patrick asks about the farm casually, saying of his parents, “I can’t forgive them, for Marianne. Him, especially” (289). Then he shakes Judd’s hand and leaves. Judd smiles, “taken by surprise. It was the first time either of his brothers had ever shaken hands with him” (290).
Chapter 33 Summary: “The Bog”
That night, Patrick (having received information from Zach’s mother again) is waiting in his jeep at the parking lot of Cobb’s Corner Inn, where Zach and his friends are drinking. When he went into the bar earlier, he saw Zach for the first time after high school and “felt a thrill of excitement in the pit of his belly. In his groin” (293). Patrick fantasizes about punishing the whole Lundt family, feeling that “the Mulvaney men had long shirked their responsibility” (294).
At 12:10 a.m., Zach and his friends leave the bar, and Zach heads for his Corvette. Patrick follows him briefly, then cuts him off and enters the Corvette pointing the rifle at Zach, who starts to beg and “tremble convulsively” (295). Patrick wonders, “Is this all there is to him?” (295). He directs Zach, who has soiled himself from fear, to drive, barely getting him to listen and obey: “He was sobbing to himself, his breath in shuddering gasps” (296). They leave the car in an isolated spot, and Patrick marches Zach out, who walks “like an invertebrate prized from its shell, naked, vulnerable” (297).
They go to the jeep, and Patrick gets Zach to drive to the bog; because of Zach’s “childlike obedience” (300), “his rage at Zachary Lundt seemed to have faded. Almost, he felt sorry for Zachary” (299). Bolstering his determination, Patrick gets Zach to walk out of the jeep and towards the bog, but even though he tells Zach he is a rapist, he feels Zach does not register Patrick’s righteous rage. The muck sucks Zach down and he quickly goes under. Watching him, Patrick thinks, “What an awful way to die” (302), and he jumps into the mud to save him: “It came upon him in a flash: he didn’t want anyone to die, not even his enemy” (302).
After losing his footing and almost falling in himself, he manages to save Zach, telling him, “I let you live, fucker. I could have let you die and I let you live—remember that” (304). He throws Zach’s car keys to him, and leaves him: “The experiment hadn’t gone as he’d planned but it was over, outside him now” (304).
Part 2, Chapters 29-33 Analysis
Chapter 29, significantly named “The Accomplice,” concerns 16-year-old Judd’s entry into the thick of the plot. So far, Judd has been on the fringes of the story by virtue of his youth. “Judd the narrator” has often almost forgetfully left him out of the loop, only touching briefly on what his younger self might have been going through. At this point, however, for the first time, the narrator wishes to stake his claim as a participant in the family drama: “I was what you’d call an accessory before the fact and an accessory after the fact. I was what you’d call a co-conspirator” (256). If he exaggerates his role, we can understand it; this is the first time any of his siblings have asked for help or even registered young Judd as remotely equal.
Indeed, as the story progresses, “Judd the narrator” builds the picture of his family members as solipsistically immersed in their own private worlds, negating the initial idea of the Mulvaney family as a paragon of unity and togetherness. The image of the perfectly harmonious family might have even been an illusion from the start: The Mulvaneys were united because nothing had challenged them before. We should consider that Oates uses the High Point Farm as another objective correlative, this time for the family’s idealized image of itself: “The house that was so beautiful in our eyes wasn’t beautiful really” (258).
Chapters 30 and 31 reveal the depth of Patrick’s obsession with revenge. His former passivity in the face of Marianne’s ordeal has transformed into a restless, angry energy. While it is true that he is the only member of the Mulvaney family who has decided to take steps regarding Marianne’s rape, it is debatable why Patrick assumes this role: If it is an expression of his need to protect his sister, he comes very late to it. Rather, Oates depicts Patrick at Cornell as leading a robot-like existence, and it is possible to interpret his sudden explosion into activity as a consequence of a profound sense of guilt for his self-involved behavior.
Still, Patrick again distances himself from his own experience by viewing it as “an experiment that can be performed only once” (273), but his focus on his studies fades as he invests all his energy into planning his “hunt,” as if, like Marianne, he too has to divest himself of the self to perform his symbolic task. Oates insists on detailing how each member of the Mulvaney family begins to lose his or her prior self after the incident, unable to recognize a course of action that would achieve a communal effect that binds, opting instead for self-regarding, individual ones that break the family apart.
Although Oates has opted not to depict Marianne’s rape directly, she describes Patrick’s revenge on Zachary in detail in Chapter 33. This depiction is necessary as it reveals the anticlimactic nature of the act, and it proves to be less than cathartic for Patrick in the sense he imagined. He has built up the idea of Zach as a larger-than-life monster deserving of brutal punishment, but the banal reality of a young, drunk, scared, cowardly man destabilizes him in his intent. Furthermore, Zach does not even seem to recognize Patrick, out of fear or simply because he has forgotten the event that for him has left no consequences, and this additionally disturbs Patrick’s resolution.
Patrick’s process of understanding that Zach is not worth killing shows that an inability to act appropriately after the rape has caused a build-up of murky, dark emotions (hence the setting of the bog, and Patrick’s nightmare in Chapter 31) that have prevented the Mulvaney family from dealing with the reality and moving on. Patrick, as The Huntsman, acts on behalf of the Mulvaneys who are stuck in their own bog of unresolved hurt, anger, and despair, and who refuse to confront the issues and thus ruin their lives in the process. By going through the process of planning the revenge and finally saving Zach’s life, Patrick releases himself from the burden of the family guilt, of the narrow family-constructed idea of himself, and with it, he lets go of the Mulvaney family altogether.
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