36 pages • 1 hour read
Mary HoodHow Far She Went
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1984A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaStory 3: “A Man Among Men”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 3, Part 1 Summary
Narrated in the third person, the third story in the collection also takes place in rural Georgia, with the corpse of Old Man Teague—the protagonist’s father and the story’s consummate “man among men” (30)—as its centerpiece. Part 1 opens with the old man lying in a casket, with the “determined-to-die look on his face that he had worn throughout his final two months of decline [...] all because of a dog” (30). The story then relates the time leading up to the old man’s death through the memory of the protagonist: his son, Thomas Teague, the town’s law enforcement officer.
Thomas recalls the disappearance of and search for the dog, Smokey Dawn, and his father’s decline after the dog was found and buried. He remembers a night after the dog’s death when he was called to the scene of an accident in which a deer was hit. Before leaving, he checks in on his father, who fails to recognize Thomas, then mistakes Thomas for Thomas’s dead brother, Earl. When Thomas asks if the old man remembers him, the old man says Thomas is dead. Thomas becomes angry and wants to “shake the old man [...] but what was the use of that” (34).
The old man’s confusion triggers a painful memory of the day his father, in response to the death of Thomas’s brother Earl, said to young Thomas, “Why couldn’t it have been you?” (34). Thomas came to understand the nature of his relationship with his father that day: “That was when Thomas knew” (34).
Story 3, Part 2 Summary
Irritated by the absence of his son, Dean, Thomas questions his wife, Olene, who tries to make excuses for their rebellious teenage son. During the wake, Thomas is called away to respond to a call about a dead body. His first thought, on viewing the young corpse, is that it’s Dean. It is not. Thomas opts to miss the rest of the wake to inform the dead boy’s family. The mother, though devastated, relates a disconnection between her and her son that is similar to that between Thomas and Dean.
Story 3, Part 3 Summary
The old man’s corpse now lies in the burial vault. After “that general, genteel exodus, with no backward glances as life went on” (42), Thomas watches the gravediggers. He is reminded of the call on the night the deer was hit—and recalls discovering it was his own son who had killed the deer.
He thinks about their strained relationship and the aggression that has replaced any tender connection between him and his son. Dean finally arrives at the end of the burial, as the last of the mourners file out with the obligatory mention of the old man being “a man among men” (45). A detached Thomas observes, “This time, it didn’t rain. It always rains” (47). It is not until Dean places his hand on Thomas’s shoulder that Thomas finally begins to cry.
Story 3 Analysis
The third story in the collection takes the experiences of isolation and loss to an even deeper and more desolate place with its subtly ironic treatment of life and death as trivial. The desolation is exacerbated by the fact that the characters have names, families, and a township of friends—those token symbols of a life well-lived that here present as exactly that—symbolic and somewhat meaningless.
Each section opens with the corpse as a matter-of-fact part of the setting, as unfeeling as a trailer or lamp. The corpse, the casket, and the vault serve as the backdrop against which Thomas performs his expected duties. His role is to be the responsible father and law enforcement officer—at the cost of making time for authentic emotion for his father or his son. They appear as a respectable Southern family, generation after generation of men among men—with the emptiness hidden behind the guise of duty and honor. It is not until his son shows emotion that Thomas is able to shed a tear—yet it remains unclear whether that tear is for the loss of his father, or for the regret of something he never had with his father.
Additional symbols include the deer killed by Dean. Thomas responds to the call and must clean up his son’s mess. The death of the deer is symbolic of the death of innocence; most notably, Dean’s innocence. Just a Thomas is a passive observer at the scene of the deer accident, he’s a passive observer with the loss of his son’s innocence, a loss now laced with aggression from both sides. The symbolism of Dean’s innocence being lost comes up as well in the death of a young man that Thomas must deal with. Thomas initially imagines the dead young man is Dean. By equating his son with a dead young man, Thomas mirrors his own father’s earlier wish that Thomas had died instead of his brother, Earl. Thomas, then, highlights just how deep the “sins of our fathers” run in this family. The same trauma of erasure that Thomas experienced with his own father, who is now dead (so impossible to reconcile with), repeats itself in Thomas thinking Dean is dead. This short story suggests that isolation will continue unheeded unless the characters can willingly break the cycle. When Dean places his hand on his father’s shoulders at the funeral, Thomas cries. This catharsis is a first step in addressing the isolation and loss both characters struggle with, though in the spirit of the stories as a whole, it isn’t clear if Thomas cries for his son, his father, or himself.
