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Book beginning: page 7

Vince’s character

• When Vince comes back in the third act: it has already been observed that his appearance is like that of his father’s, due to Dodge thinking he was Tilden in act II; he is now currently drunk like the rest of his family; and singing a marine song which reminisces Ansel being a soldier and is something Halie deemed so important a quality in his life.
• Vince’s character simply carries on the actions others have started: when getting rid of Bradley, it was Shelly to initially take his leg from him, Vince only continued on pushing it until he was out of the house; and Dodge was the one to build the farm and then pass it onto Vince, who now has every intention of rebuilding it.

The family

• Shelly says to Vince “and you were worried about me making the right first impression!” (p34), when presented with the madness of his family who appeared not to recognise him. But did he never worry about them making a good impression on her, were they once so calm and collected that the thought never crossed his mind?
• When Vince was driving and saw his reflection in the windscreen, he analysed his face as if it were someone else’s, and then watched how the bones, eyes, and nose changed into other family members’. If the bones in the reflection are an important feature to recognise family members past (p71), then you can understand why the baby’s bones are so important out back.

Dodge and Halie’s bad marriage

• From beginning to end, Halie is more active than Dodge in life, and getting pregnant when her and her husband were heading toward “the middle part of [their] life” (p66) indicates she was most likely more fertile too. She is shown to act on impulsive behaviour and not think things through, so was her marriage to Dodge based on the same type of decision making? He was said to have warned her it would be different to life in the city (p54), so why exactly did she marry him to begin with?

Lies, secrets, and denial

• When Halie looks out of the window in act one to see if there are any crops growing, she can see the rain but nothing else (p8). Perhaps she never does what she says she is doing? The reader knows the characters are prone to lying, and Halie says she won’t be gone long (p21) but comes back the next day (act three). So it is not a stretch to think she never even looked out of the window but just assumed there was nothing or made up what ever took her fancy in her delusional world.
• Dodge says he is “surrounded by thieves” (p51) because everyone keeps taking his bottles of alcohol, however, he robbed his wife, and from what the reader is to understand, his son Tilden, of parenting a child, by far a worse crime than the petty theft of Tilden and Vince.

Women in the play

• Dodge does not think much of ‘hopers’ (p52) which is not only a comment primarily aimed at the females in the play (as it is said to Shelly and feels like an indirect comment about Halie) but makes it clear that it is women who have taken his own hope from him in life.
• Only the women in the play appear to go to sleep upstairs in beds, the men stay lazily downstairs (p53), even Shelly, who only spent one night in the house, made it upstairs. She metaphorically took Halie’s place, much in the same way Bradley, and then Vince, took Dodge’s.
• Halie is more bark than bite. When Shelly cowers, Halie talks down to her but when Shelly fights back, Halie turns to Father Dewis to help her, saying “Father, do something about this would you! I’m not about to be terrorized in my own house!” (p63).
• Dodge originally said Shelly was a bad influence but she turns out to honestly be a good person, seen when she says “I was just coming along for the ride. I thought it would be a nice gesture” (p64). She had not known Vince long but she put herself out there for him, although, she did go on to say “besides, I was curious.”

Emasculation and childishness

• Tilden always says whatever he has to so that people leave him alone (p24), or in the best of cases, sticks to his guns but under his breath and weeping as though he has given up on standing up for himself and fighting in life.

Stuck in the past

• When Halie says she loves the smell just after it has rained because “it’s like the ground is breathing” (p21), it feels as though she is making a reference to the buried baby outside, who in these moments seems as though he is still breathing, still with them.

How did they get here?

• Halie making her first appearance in all black shows that she is stuck in the past and that it is perhaps this that drives her to frivolous behaviour. However, returning in act three in all yellow, demonstrates how with a little drink she can forget all her woes, and after her story of going to the races with the breeder man, gives the impression that she has been prone to this behaviour all long, not originating in the secret that looms over the family, but being the cause of it in the first place.
• When Shelly says Bradley stuck his hand in her mouth, Halie’s reaction is not the norm for such inappropriate behaviour, but to say to him “did you put your hand in this girl’s mouth? You have no idea what kind of diseases she might be carrying” (p62). Instead of educating him properly and not being rude herself, she thinks only of the possible bad in others, much like she accuses Dodge of doing. Is this odd reaction and lack of educating the children well, how they got to this point in life, by making one little bad decision after another?
• Dodge refers to his entire marriage as a “sham” (p54), and as much as he achieved with his farm and raising three boys, it means nothing to him due to his wife’s infidelity. The odd thing about it all does not seem to be the incest or resulting baby that turned him into a murderer but that it rendered everything else null. It is his life’s work seeming nothing that affects him, not the remorse he holds for being a murderer, he appears to feel quite justified in his actions as they “couldn’t let a thing like that continue” (p66).

History repeating itself

• The family dynamic was supposed to have changed so that Bradley was now the strong one, however, in the end even he was “reaching pathetically in the air for his leg” (p63). So they seem to be back to where they started, and when Dodge dies, Tilden and Bradley take his secondary place in the house. It took the youngest generation to take charge, and maybe this is where the older two went wrong. Instead of trying to be strong and independent, especially in Bradley’s case, they were literally trying to take over Dodge’s current place in the household. Had they tried to take over what he was before and make a success of the farm, things may have turned out differently for them.
• Halie says that Vince was the good one, she knew everything would be alright as long as he was good, but now that he isn’t, she does not seem overall affected by this. She just ends up going up stairs talking away as she had always done.
• If Vince is implying that he wants a new start when he says all of the equipment is going to be “brand-new” (p72), he may not be going about it in the right fashion, as he takes the blanket from Bradley and throws it over his own shoulders, mirroring what Bradley had repeatedly done to Dodge. It is a symbol designated to whoever is in charge at that particular moment.

What does the future hold?

• At first Dodge’s cough is slow and soft but then gradually builds (p7) which is to a certain extent how the problems are presented in the play, although they are quite bad even to begin with. The progression goes from an ill old man who has clearly fallen out of love with his wife, and a questionable son who randomly brings in vegetables that his parents insist he must be stealing, to utter ignorance of a family member, questionable behaviour towards guests and admitting murder. Ending in usurpation of the farm by Vince and the exile of Bradley (who fortunately had a home to go to). Dodge’s cough ended in his death, is this an indication of what is in store for the rest of the family?
• Their situation was a matter of time and adaption, Dodge spoke from experience when he said “[Shelly will] get used to it” (p33), which she did amazingly quickly, as by the start of act three she is in the kitchen making soup. It also gives the feel that she will come back some day.
• There is a moment when Vince removes the knife from his mouth when climbing into the house, to smell the roses, in a gesture of exchanging destruction and pain for nature and nurture (p71).
• When Halie finally sees Tilden was right about the growing crops, she says “it’s like a paradise out there […] I’ve never seen it like this” (p73), insinuating that this self-growing crop is the best it has ever been, possibly indicating a brighter future than ever for the remaining family members. Although, Vince did say “my grandmother? There’s nobody else in the house. Except for you [Father Dewis]. And you’re leaving aren’t you?” (p72), which means that whatever benefits there are, Vince will keep them for himself, even though he does not look like he will exile Halie and Tilden, as he most likely would have gotten rid of them with Bradley. It seems as though he will simply allow them to live there, without really taking any notice of them.

Fate

• Dodge’s first thoughts of Shelly are that she is “temporary stuff” (p34), then he takes to her, asking for her to stay with him when Halie returns in act three. But it is unclear if this initial comment is accurate or if Vince was right when he said you can try to run but you wont make it.
• Will Shelly ever find that Vince was right in thinking you cannot get any further from there, there is no leaving and come back to him? Is that why she felt like it was her home? (p53).

Entering the house

• As Vince enters the house, Shelly can be seen outside on the porch where he has just come from, it is as though they now act as opposing forces (p70). She remains good, whilst he has turned somewhat tyrannical.

Absurd moments

• When Halie sees the corn Tilden has brought in and says there has not been any corn there for over thirty years, Dodge defends him by saying “the world doesn’t stop just because you’re up stairs. Corn keeps growing” (p19). What is odd about this is that Dodge defends his son with the truth but it is a truth he does not believe, as he has already stated that he believes there is “nothing out there” (p13).
• There are barely two characters that talk to each other who seem to have the same information: Halie says Tilden is around the house and Dodge says he is not; then Dodge says Tilden is here and Vince says he is in New Mexico (p31). It seems as though every time one character says something, the other instinctively says ‘no it isn’t so’.

The beginning and end of the play

• Given how distracted Halie was when she left the house in act one, and how none of them really stick to facts and remember the past, and on top she was somewhat drunk on her arrival home in act three, it is surprising that she remembered Tilden had said anything about the corn at all. The only assumption is that he made such a mess in the house that it stuck with her.

Underlying factor

• Placing Shelly in such a peculiar circumstance without it even being her own family, seems odd that she could survive so well. But she tells Tilden that she’s “been around” (p45), meaning that not only has she seen some things in her time but so have most people. If you were to stick any random person in this situation, there will always be a possibility that they could survive it, and that not many people, if any, get to live a sheltered or simply perfect home life. That is not to take away anything from this rather peculiar family life or any of the positive qualities in the characters, such as Shelly’s strength and understanding, but to emphasise that a problematic home life can befall anyone.

Questions raised

• How do Dodge and Tilden still manage to get along so well, should there not be more friction between them?
• Why did Halie decide to have the child? Had she not thought the repercussions through? Was it because it would be unChristian to abort it?
• How exactly does the reader reach a conclusion for the events before and during the time span of the play? Is there certain information discarded and other definitely true? Even if Dodge’s confession were not 100% true, would anyone have corrected him? Does the reader ever really have a grasp on events?

Shepard, Sam. Buried Child. Dramatists Play Service INC. 1997.