20 pages • 40 minutes read
Robert FrostOut, Out—
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1916A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Buzz Saw
The buzz saw in “‘Out, Out—’” is a complex symbol. Most basically, its capacity to inflict serious and deadly injuries—as shown in the narrative—symbolizes sudden and violent death. Yet even before the injury, the association between the saw and death is hinted by the mention that the saw “made dust” (Line 2) because of the traditional association between dust and death. More conceptually, the saw represents the encroachment of the industrial world into the agricultural domain; by extension, then, the saw represents the threat to tradition by innovation. Also, since the saw “snarl[s] and rattle[s]” (Line 1)—that is, sounds both animal and mechanical, like something it is and is not—it epitomizes the poetic tension between figurative and literal representation.
The Boy
The poem’s symbolic message relies on the fact that it is a child, not an adult, who dies. Traditionally, youth represents innocence. Yet notice this is a “big boy / Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart” (Lines 23-24). In other words, while still very much an innocent, we know it is a matter of time before he is an adult and no longer an innocent. As lamentable as that circumstance may be, still worse is the loss of life even before innocence is lost, which is the case of this boy. The boy never has the chance to grow to his potential. Consequently, his death by means of the machine, of industrialization, and of the Modern implies that innovation will rob society of benefits found only in traditional culture.
Ether
Though occupying a relatively small place in the poem’s overall scheme, the phrase “the dark of ether” (Line 28) offers some symbolic qualities. Ether is the chemical used to anesthetize people for surgery. However, because sleep is a traditional symbol for death, saying the boy is placed under “the dark of ether” foreshadows his death. However, these lines also mark a distinction between human and natural powers: While the doctor places the boy in one sort of darkness, nature will follow with another sort—death. Additionally, since the boy receives the ether not as an act of nature but due to human invention and intervention, his eventual death highlights the inability of innovation to fix what it breaks. That is, while the boy is wounded by the saw, by the recent invention, medicine (manifested by the ether) is unable to spare his life. Innovation, in other words, causes problems it cannot solve.
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