48 pages • 1 hour read
Ann PatchettRun
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This novel contains descriptions of drug abuse.
The chapter opens as Bernard Doyle’s sisters-in-law visit him at home, asking for an heirloom that belonged to his recently deceased wife, Bernadette. Doyle refuses; the heirloom, a statue of the Virgin Mary that resembles Bernadette, will pass down to their Black adoptive sons, Tip and Teddy.
Via flashback, Doyle reminiscences about his wife, beginning with receiving the statue as a wedding gift and Bernadette relaying family stories of its origins. Her great-grandfather (Billy Lovell) stole the statue from a church in Ireland during the early 20th century. He used it to woo the beautiful and pious Doreen Clark, whom it resembled; he fabricated a tale of getting the statue in Rome from the Pope’s wood sculptor. Doreen loved the statue and married Billy. In the first years of their marriage, Doreen enjoyed other people’s admiration and envy when they would visit their home: “[T]hey never got tired of seeing Mother Mary as Doreen. The women crossed themselves and said its beauty was exactly like hers, though the ones who were jealous added on the phrase ‘had been’” (7). Doreen prayed to it daily and the couple was happy for eight years, until a man at the pub revealed Billy’s crime. Doreen sent him out to return the statue, but Billy came back. He could not find the church. For years, Doreen sent him out, though she and their five children hoped that he would not find the church. He did not. The statue was passed down through the generations, a tradition that launched intense sibling rivalries and jealousy. Bernadette’s grandmother, Loretta, had “to pack up the statue and her family and take the boat” from Ireland to Boston because her siblings were “furious” that she received the statue (12).
The statue was eventually passed to Bernadette by her mother. Bernadette’s sisters were envious, taunting her with their “chorus of petulance”: “Bernadette’s the lucky one” (12). Her siblings’ jealousy eventually led Bernadette to think that this is true: “She had the statue after all, the image of herself, and her mother, and her mother’s mother before her all the way back to Ireland” (12). Bernadette did not pray to the statue until their only biological son, Sullivan, was born. She and Doyle struggled to have more children, so 12 years after Sullivan, they adopted Teddy at four days old. They also adopted his older brother, 14-month-old Tip. On a trip to the pediatrician with the boys, Doyle recalls the doctor sighting a lump on Bernadette’s neck.
Chapter 1 Analysis
Chapter 1 is a capsule story within Run, detached in time from the rest of the novel’s action. However, Chapter 1’s story is significant because its characters and the heirloom return in the novel. It introduces Bernadette’s statue of the Virgin Mary, an important symbol in the novel. The statue initially stands for a romantic lie through which Billy Lovell won, and then lost, the love of his life. As the chapter unfolds, readers come to see resonances between the statue’s origin story and the Doyle family’s difficulties.
In Chapter 1, Ann Patchett introduces the theme of Differences Between Family Legacies and Family Stories through her characterizations. Billy and Doreen establish a family legacy when they decide to pass the beautiful statue down to one of their daughters who resembles Doreen; however, this tradition creates intense rivalries and jealousy. At the same time, Bernadette’s beautiful face not only becomes associated with her being “lucky”; it becomes her key to identifying with her family history. Yet, this luck is decidedly mixed, as Bernadette tries to “divorce” herself from her history after marrying Doyle (4), though Patchett’s narrator offers readers no explanation for this. Through Bernadette’s storytelling and recollections, Patchett introduces ambiguity in the legacies and stories that are passed through families, suggesting both damage and joy.
Beginning with Doreen and Billy, the statue’s beauty becomes a powerful force in the life of the family, having an intoxicating influence particularly on Doreen. Upon seeing herself as the Virgin Mary in the statue, Doreen’s vanity overcomes her pre-marital desire to lead the devout life of a nun. Billy’s fabricated stories of world travels do not impress Doreen; rather, the statue’s beauty takes her: “Standing at the front door of the bakery In the center of town where the great-grandfather had begged her to meet him for only three minutes, Doreen Clark fell in love with the statue” (6). Importantly, Patchett’s narrator makes no mention here of Doreen loving Billy, centering the tropes of a love story around the statue instead. Doreen becomes so over-identified with the statue’s beauty that when others look at it, they see “Mother Mary as Doreen” (7), rather than Doreen as Mother Mary. Doreen also begins the family practice of praying to the statue, which passes to Bernadette. The statue’s beauty thus became the center of the family’s in-home, daily worship, inflecting their understandings of love and God. By attaching their daily devotional rituals to an image of Doreen’s physical beauty, the family unwittingly takes up a form of idolatry. The Virgin Mary statue thus becomes a coveted icon of beauty and good fortune, rather than a tool for religious worship. Bernadette describes her own habit of praying to the statue along these lines: “She prayed for the strength and wisdom to be satisfied by all she had, a beautiful son, a loving husband. She prayed to stop praying, a pastime that never failed to make her feel selfish and childish” (13). Her first prayer of thanks is indeed centered around beauty—her “beautiful son”—emphasizing the vanity attached to the statue, of which Bernadette is partially aware.
Bernadette tells Doyle that she never wants to repeat her family stories about the statue. Although neither Bernadette nor Patchett’s narrator explain her desire to distance herself from her family history, her decision is implicitly associated with the deception, jealousy, and selfishness with which the heirloom has been associated in the past. Bernadette attempts to detach the story from the material legacy. Chapter 1 hence prompts readers to think about the Differences Between Family Legacies and Family Stories and the ways that passing them both down to future generations yields surprising effects.
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