Killings

This story renders the complexity and depth of emotion that accompanies the most quotidian and universal of human events: having children, being married, infidelity, experiencing parental and romantic love, and the keeping of secrets. Each of these events is something that almost every Western subject will either experience directly or come into proximity with during their lifetime. Dubus, however, is interested in the distinct and acute emotions and psychological machinations that accompany these mundane events—the small, yet crucial, elements that elevate them above the routine and make them intense, and intensely individual, affairs. Within the story’s narrative system, even murder becomes swallowed into the quotidian, as it is ensconced within an emotional and psychological context that feels utterly ordinary and relatable. From Richard Strout’s murderous reaction to being emasculated and abandoned, to Matt Fowler’s quiet, calculated act of cathartic vengeance for his fallen son, Dubus depicts what might otherwise be seen as spectacular or extreme as eminently logical, albeit weighted by intense psychological distress.

The character of Matt Fowler is a prime example of Dubus’s exploration of what lies beneath the mundane. An unassuming white man close to retirement age who lives in a working-class, sleepy beach town and runs a department store, he seems like a simple, unremarkable man, and an unlikely murderer. He almost seems archetypal in his persona, thereby lending credence to Dubus’s exploration of what lies beneath the surface of the everyday. It is the acute and intense emotions surrounding his marriage, his children, his own sexual desires, and the intricate ways in which he represses those emotions, that Dubus is methodically and intricately interested in depicting throughout the story.

“Killings,” in many ways, is a story about limits: the demarcation of strict social limits that are imposed by taboos, the limits on life that are baldly asserted by the fact of mortality, the limits of familial and romantic intimacy, the strategic limits to emotional access and impulse that people place upon both themselves and each other through the keeping of secrets, and the repression of the id.

Among the quotidian taboos that are broken in the story is unbridled feminine sexuality. The lithe, seductive, and beautiful Mary Ann fills the archetypal role of the Jezebel, her unbridled sexuality a siren song, a cause for ostracism, and, ultimately, the animating impetus of not only almost every man in the story, but of the story as a whole. It is Frank’s quietly passionate love affair with Mary Ann that sets his own demise into motion. Matt’s sublimated desire for Mary Ann, sharply foiled by his drably dutiful—yet not unloving—union with his wife, (or, perhaps, his desire for and jealousy of the sexual passion that she and Frank share) is inarguably a prominent aspect of his motivation.

Richard, the cuckolded and humiliated husband, is driven to murderous rage in his quest to restore himself before Mary Ann. In the breaking of patriarchal taboo, which requires women to have no individual sexual agency, Mary Annvibrates, understatedly, at the story’s core. It is her sexuality that provokes not only the unraveling, but also the deeply satisfying exercise of passion and pleasure, of the men around her. Through this narrative/character device, Dubus asks the reader to question both the efficacy of the taboo in maintaining social order and civility, and the notion that the basest human instincts—those for sex, dominance, and violence—can or should ever be fully brought to heel. If something so simple and primordial as the sexuality of a woman can bring normally functioning and composed men to their knees, and if they are only one act of either sex or betrayal away from becoming that which society outlaws and abhors (killers),is there any practical use for taboos at all? Through the character of Mary Ann and the depiction of the men’s descent into their ids, Dubus shines a light on the savagery and passion that social norms and taboos only just barely veil and rein in with their paper-thin façades.

It is, however, worth noting that both Richard Strout and Matt Fowler precipitously return from their respective descents. Richard quietly submits to the judicial process following his impulsive and explosive murder of Frank. Too, the younger and more virile Richard’s act of murder is much more indicative of a flight of passion, while Matt’s highly-planned and premeditated act mirrors his hesitance to completely submit to his own impulses.

Tellingly, Matt doubts himself during the entire prologue to his murder of Richard, and the only time he fully embraces the act is in the instants in which it is actually committed. Immediately after, and in his retelling of the episode to Ruth, Matt feels utterly dissociated and far away from both the act itself and his primal self. In essence, he quickly returns to a state of repressionin which his impulses, passions, and desires are safely masked and buried deep within his psyche.

Through this depiction, Dubus makes his depiction of the battle between the ego and the id complete. Matt, who only truly surrendered to his base instincts in the few moments that were spent shooting Richard Strout, immediately dissociates from his own consciousness in the aftermath of the killing, feels dissociated in his retelling of the murder, and ends the story performing an act of emotional repression: burying his sob deep in his heart. Having buried his youngest son, who was an embodiment of virility, youth, and sexual passion—as well as Richard Strout, who was also an embodiment of very similar characteristics, although he was clearly an older and more damaged person than Frank—Matt resumes his own repressive practice of metaphorically burying his own passions within himself. He thereby also brings Dubus’s exploration of the underbelly of the ordinary to a satisfying close. At the end of the story, he will be seen by those around him as the very same person who began it, but the reader knows both the depths of passion, despair, and vengeance that lie buried within his heart.