Monday, March 3, 2014
Kelly #4
After the death of the Judge, Jack realizes that is real father was the Judge. The death shakes Jack up but tears apart his mother as she realizes that she was truly in love with the Judge. Jack had never thought that his mother had been in love, and that was why the furniture and men always changed. "She was saying how she had loved him and how he was the only person she had ever loved and how I had killed him and had killed my own father and a lot of stuff like that."(p487) The knowledge of his own past transformed Jack and allowed him to understand his family. Jack realizes that the Scholarly Attorney is stuck in the past and Jack's feelings towards the Scholarly Attorney are changed to sympathy and empathy. Jack also realizes his true love for Anne after seeing his mothers true love for the Judge. Though the death of the Judge may have been tragic and sudden, confusing and eye opening, it lead to a new Jack Burden. The person that Jack Burden used to be, before the death of the Judge was different. When Jack is told that he is the sole beneficiary of the Judge's will and the estate is his, he breaks into tears, saying "The whole arrangement seemed so crazy and so logical, that after I had hung up the phone I burst out laughing and could scarcely stop. Before I stopped, as a matter of fact, I found that I was not laughing at all but was weeping and was saying over and over again: "the poor old bugger, the poor old bugger." It was like the ice breaking up after a long winter, and the winter had been long."(p494) After Jack and Anne come together, Jacks transformation and sympathy
causes him to bring the Scholarly Attorney to live with them after he
finds the man "sick in a room above the Mexican restaurant" (p606). The person who Jack was before never would have picked Ellis up and brought him home with him, he wouldn't even thought about it twice. The death of the Judge turned out to be a good thing for Jack, and he becomes closer with himself and closer with the people around him. He becomes free and is able to relieve himself of all the burdens he had grown throughout his life.
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I definitely agree with your point about how the Judge's death makes Jack question his own identity. Even though the Judge's death was heartbreaking for his mother, it is almost like Jack finds a renewed sense of self amongst the sadness. Just as you said, "Jack becomes free." It's almost like the Judge was "judgement" looming over Jack and forbidding him to fully be himself, as he always seemed burdened when in a conversation about the judge. "I asked, 'Is the Judge a man to scare easily?' I answered 'He does not scare easily.' That left money. So I asked: 'Does the Judge love money?'...Was there ever a time when the Judge didn't have enough money to make the Judge happy?' But naturally that wouldn't be chicken feed" (271). This back and forth obsessing over the Judge shows that in order for Jack to not fear him, he must figure out everything about him. It's almost like he viewed the Judge as just another man who could change just like the furniture and, as Trevin pointed out "the other men." Jack twists and turns with the concept of identity, and that takes him back to his haunting childhood memories. "Some voice out of my childhood whispered, but I could not catch what it said. I had the vague sense rising from a depth of time, and of myself, of being a child, of entering the room where the grown people were, of knowing that they had just that instant stopped talking because I had come into the room" (271). This is always the way Jack seemed to feel with the Judge. In his mother's apparent love of the Judge, Jack was left to be an outsider for so long, but now that the Judge is gone, Jack feels he has regained some of himself. It brought him closer with his mother and gave him some comfort as to the merit of his own relationships and his own thoughts.
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