24 pages • 48 minutes read
Greg HollingsheadThe Roaring Girl
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1995A 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 Service Station
The mother reacts angrily when she first hears about the father’s ideas to open a service station. But once she sees the construction of the station in progress, “with half-built, chest-high walls in concrete block,” she sees there is “no turning back” and accepts the idea (56). But the father never finishes the station. On its opening weekend, the author writes, “the boy fretted that the station should be so raw and unfinished and that his father could not afford to pave even a small area around the pumps. Dust coated everything” (57). As the father and the boy work at the station, it remains unfinished. Its unfinished state troubles the boy because it symbolizes the father’s failure to realize his ideas.
The station remains a place of strange mystery inhabited by inhuman figures like the boy's dead brother Jim and the dog. The author writes, “As one who knew death, the first Jim would have felt at home with tools and engines, driveshafts, electrical systems, the smell of dust and exhaust and gasoline and foul toilets” (58). When the boy and the father discover the girl in the station, the boy half expected that she was Jim, rising from the dead.
Once the girl robs the station and leaves with Ed, the father loses his factory job and must abandon the station while it is still half-built, reflecting once again the man’s dashed ambitions.
The Basement
The girl lives in the basement, a place full of cat hair to which the boy is strongly allergic. The girl’s presence there transforms the basement into a place of wonder for the boy. The whole basement, including the bathroom which is decorated with childish fish decals, is made new by her presence. The boy marvels that she brushes her teeth where he once brushed his teeth. He feels strongly connected to her and wants to understand the room from her point of view.
The boy understands that this desire to understand the girl’s point of view is really a desire for her to understand him. He needs someone to know and understand him in a way his parents never could. The boy wishes he could be like one of the cars that the girl works on in the station pit. He wants her to diagnose his problems and fix him. The girl, who lives and works in these underground areas, has an otherworldly knowledge of the world that the boy deeply desires.
The Closet
When the boy’s parents fight, he retreats to his closet where he attempts to block out their loud yelling. In the closet, he can create his own environment. Most of the time, he strictly observes the world around him, carefully watching his parents and every movement they make. But when they fight, he retreats from these observations and chooses to remake his environment so that it is in his control and therefore less scary.
When the girl plays the television too loud, he is unable to block out these loud sounds. Yet unlike when his parents fight, the boy exercises control by turning off the television. Doing so shocks the girl, and the boy himself is shocked at his ability to step out of the safety of his known environment to assert himself.
The Human Body
The boy frequently acknowledges his parents’ beauty and size. For example, the boy describes the father’s hand as eclipsing the light. This makes it hard for the boy to relate to the parents; their large bodies exist on a different scale. Their bodies also startle the boy because they carry the markers of a hard life. Factory machinery mangled the father’s fingernail. The mother had a stillborn which almost killed her. Before that, she suffered a burst appendix. These scars make the boy fear the world, and he feels he must carefully observe its fault lines. He searches for any cracks that could hurt his parents further.
Later, when he discovers the pornography magazine, he sees the bodies of the women as if they are mutilated in their naked rawness. Most disturbing to him is the way one of the women in the pictures, wearing nothing but worn-down heels, stares out at the viewer, confronting his gaze. It makes him feel sick to his stomach, but he can’t look away either. The stare forces him to confront the massive abyss between the viewer and the body. He must view a different kind of scarring, scarring that he participates in when he opens the magazine.
