THE LOST BOY analysis

Part 1, written in third person, presents Grover's perception of a childhood epiphany experienced months before the family moves from North Carolina to St. Louis. Cheated and accused of stealing by a candy-store owner, the boy seeks out his father, who returns with him to the store and extracts retribution, leaving the boy with a restored sense of self but a deeper understanding of life's darker side. 30 years after the boy's death, the still-grieving mother reflects on her "best" son and recounts the high excitement of the train trip to the Fair and the son's amazing maturity. Throughout her narrative, the mother exemplifies life's irreparable wounding. The "abundant sense of loss" that permeates the text reminds us that grief is not only for the one who has died, but also for oneself, the living who must carry on despite the loss and who must come to terms with the paradoxical presence/ absence it creates.

The grief work that follows a death of a loved one can be both daunting and redemptive, a recursive process that moves with agonizing slowness. To echo the opening lines of The Lost Boy, it is much like the light in the town square that "came and went and came again," Wolfe's visual metaphor for the nonlinear nature of time, memory, and emotion that infuse grief. In The Lost Boy, Wolfe depicts a close relationship between narrative and work. Human labor and enterprise appear in many forms throughout the text and are strongly associated with the grief and loss central to the story. Completed just a year before Wolfe's death in 1938, The Lost Boy spans a thirty-year period marked by profound loss on many fronts.

The era included such events as World War I; the 1918 flu pandemic, which claimed Benjamin Wolfe, Grover's twin, just before his twenty-sixth birthday; the Great Depression; and what would soon become another cataclysmic world war. These events form a subtle, but important, backdrop against which personal suffering and loss are cast. The autobiographical underpinnings of the novella also contribute to this background, making the grief portrayed in the work especially poignant. In addition, aspects of work and enterprise figure prominently into the family's history and into the events surrounding Grover Wolfe's death. The children will see the Fair and they will be away from you'" (qtd. in Norwood 183). Theme of The Story One of Wolfe’s great themes is loss. Grover himself is lost, first in the candy store in a situation he cannot handle, then lost in time and to his family in a deeper, irrevocable sense, through his death.

His mother, too, in a way, is lost in the past; perhaps the only way she can still be with the son she loves so much, although possibly to the detriment of her living children. To his mother, nothing is the same now, so she chooses to live in the familiar past rather than in the present. In Helen’s voice, there is always a note of deep regret. Life has not brought her what she expected, and she does not understand why. Bewildered and struggling to express herself, she begs college-educated Eugene to explain to her why their lives have turned out as they have. Finally, through his visit to the St. Louis house. Wolfe’s characteristic style, impressionistic realism, is heavy with a wealth of sensory imagery, as when Eugene’s memory of St.