47 pages • 1-hour read
Brother
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Themes
The Powerful Influence of Family
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of bullying, sexual violence, rape, child abuse, child sexual abuse, child death, animal cruelty, animal death, addiction, graphic violence, sexual content, cursing, death, physical abuse, and emotional abuse.
In Brother, Ahlborn creates the murderous Morrow family, and through them, she explores the negative ways that family members can affect one another and the overall family dynamic. The family’s dynamic is shaped by murder and abuse, and as the novel develops, she illustrates how Momma’s influence has shaped the family and can lead only to their eventual destruction.
The Morrows have a negative influence on one another—they create harmful models and push one another into toxic behaviors. Momma, as the head of the family, organizes the family’s savage murders to fulfill her need to kill, molding each member of the family to fit their role. Wade, Reb, and Michael abduct and torture women for Momma’s benefit, but she also determines the fate of her children. She kills Lauralynn and Misty Dawn but keeps Reb and Michael alive. Separately, Momma and Wade adversely impact their children, whose actions begin to reflect the dynamic they’ve been raised in. Momma keeps Misty Dawn in the house, compelling her to try and start a romantic relationship with Michael. The cruel atmosphere leads Reb to reasonably believe that Lauralynn will run away, giving him the impetus to kidnap Michael, a skill he learned from his mother. His father enables Reb’s misuse of alcohol and encourages violence in Michael by giving him a gun. As the children grow up under these influences, they evolve to develop their own murderous habits.
Michael tries to counter the horrid influence, but the end suggests that the only way to stop the Morrows is categorical destruction. Michael doesn’t prevent Misty’s death, but he disrupts the typically gruesome process by which the family deals with dead bodies. Rather than cut her up like the other women, he humanely buries her in her favorite hill. The moment is a rare sign of agency in which he genuinely deviates from the Morrows’ model. Killing Momma, Wade, and even Reb doesn’t represent a departure from the Morrows’ influence; however justified, Michael still resorts to violence and death—the central traits of his family. By doing so, Michael conforms to Reb’s “master plan,” in which he collapses the Morrow family structure. As Michael kills Reb, Michael “wins,” but his victory doesn’t last long as he faces his own death at Alice’s hands—justice for taking part in so many deaths.
With Michael’s death at the end of the novel, Ahlborn indicates that for the toxic family dynamic to end, no Morrow could survive. The family atmosphere corrupted all of them, including Michael, and there was no way any of them could survive. The Morrows had no future; the ongoing abuse made healing impossible. Momma tells Michael, “I never meant to hurt no one” (460). However, under her direction, hurt became the status quo for the family; as each member of the family is killed, even Michael, Ahlborn suggests that a family so corrupted could only end in death.
The Difference Between Loyalty and Complicity
Through Michael’s story, Ahlborn examines the concept of loyalty, questioning what he owes to the Morrow family. She also introduces the concept of complicity and studies how it intersects with loyalty to keep Michael in the family.
Michael’s brother Reb purposely conflates complicity and loyalty, making Michael believe that he has a moral obligation to stick with the Morrows. He convinces Michael that if he abandoned them, he wouldn’t be leaving a toxic environment; rather, he’d be in the wrong, ungratefully ditching the family that took him in. To manipulate Michael, Reb reframes the story of how Michael came to be a part of the family. When they are young, he tells Michael, “You’re lucky, you know. Some kids don’t get a second family. Some kids get taken to the woods and left for the wolves and the bears” (74). Reb twists what actually occurred—Michael’s abduction—and makes it seem like Michael’s “first” family discarded him. In this version of the story, the Morrows charitably took him in, saving him from the Appalachian wilderness. The lie elicits Michael’s obedience and becomes the accepted narrative. As an adult, Michael still believes that “the Morrows had swept down from heaven like angels and plucked him out of harm’s way, swaddled him and taken him into their home when nobody else had wanted him” (266). Using Reb’s twisted logic, Michael believes that participating in around 30 murders doesn’t make him complicit: It turns him into an upstanding family member who is dutifully repaying the Morrows for rescuing him.
However, Michael’s thinking on the subject begins to shift once Reb implements his “master plan.” He doesn’t need Michael’s loyalty anymore and again reframes Michael’s role in the family as complicity. He tells Alice, “Not sure you guys will wanna hang out after this, though. He helped me drag your momma out of the house a few nights ago […] And then we had her for dinner. Probably still have leftovers, if you’re hungry” (478). Now, Michael’s acts don’t qualify as honorably helping his brother. Reb’s blunt assessment recontextualizes Michael’s actions as reprehensible crimes: He was an accessory to murder, he dissected her, and then he ate her. Michael begins to see that nothing he did stemmed from a noble concept like loyalty. All along, he was merely complicit in perpetuating gruesome death.
At the end of the novel, Michael recognizes this himself. As he drives to the house with green shutters, he “wept for all the girls, from his present to his past, each one unique in their own way” (431). His emotion is sincere, but it won’t undo the harm or bring back the women he and his family killed. Alice kills him because there’s no way for him to make up for the evil that he, however misguidedly, helped create, and with his death, Ahlborn illustrates that his revelation is not enough to be his redemption.
The Cyclical Nature of Trauma
Brother features a family that is both the product and purveyor of trauma: the Morrows. Each member of the family has trauma, and together, they inflict harm on others, creating fresh trauma. Through their example, the novel explores the cyclical nature of trauma and how its effects continue to play out over the course of a lifetime.
Momma is the main source of trauma in the novel; it is her plan that forces everyone in the family to participate in abduction and murder. However, her actions have their own origins in trauma: Grandpa Eugene sexually assaulted Momma, and Grandma Jean didn’t interfere. Michael suspects the grandparents’ “meanness had been so severe that it had rubbed off on Claudine like a contagious disease” (145). Rather than confront the “meanness” and try to heal, Momma perpetuates it. She regularly retraumatizes herself by brutalizing and killing women with strawberry-blond hair who have a resemblance to herself. Further, she traumatizes her family through physical abuse, psychological abuse, and murder. Trauma is at the center of Momma’s life, and as a matriarch, she has the authority to expose everyone in her vicinity to extreme harm.
The other key purveyor of trauma in the narrative is Reb, who traumatizes Michael. However, Reb is also a product of his own trauma; Momma traumatizes him by killing Lauralynn, the sister that he was the closest to. Following Momma’s lead, Reb deals with his trauma by passing on the harm to Michael, whom he physically and mentally bullies. He also continues the cycle of pain by brutalizing the abducted women. As the women look like Momma, there’s a limit to how much satisfaction Reb derives from the acts, and so he shifts his focus, instead carrying out a complex plan to destroy Michael. Reb tells his brother, “Can’t blame me for lookin’ away from the thing that hurt me and lookin’ toward the thing that would hurt you instead” (477). With this comment, Reb directly addresses both his trauma and his method of coping with it. As with Momma, Reb avoids confronting his “hurt,” instead passing it along to Michael.
By contrast, Lauralynn and Misty provide an alternative to this cycle of trauma. They don’t try to pass around the substantial hurt that they’ve experienced but instead attempt to attack it directly. Lauralynn doesn’t kill anyone for killing her bunnies; instead, she confronts Momma. Likewise, Misty Dawn doesn’t hurt anyone to compensate for her confinement and Momma and Reb’s abuse. She, too, confronts Momma, illustrating that the sisters have the will to face their harm. However, in the end, their different strategy proves inadequate, resulting instead in their deaths. With their example, Ahlborn offers a different way to cope with trauma but suggests that it still might not be enough, reinforcing her message about the cyclical nature of trauma.
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