Mystic River

“Jimmy and Dave came from the Flats […] the Point and the Flats didn’t mix much. It wasn’t like the Point glittered with gold streets and silver spoons. […] people in the Point owned. People in the Flats rented.” 

Early on, Sean is differentiated from Jimmy and Dave through class. In acknowledging the economic disparity between the two boys, the novel conveys the nuanced but deeply felt ways in which class consciousness affects a community. Though the Flats and the Point are both working-class neighborhoods, it is the Flats that carries a bad reputation simply because it is the poorer of the two neighborhoods. Ironically, Dave is abducted from the Point, not the Flats. The two neighborhoods are consistently contrasted, even in their names; metaphorically, the Flats indicates a changeless, fixed state that is often indicative of poverty; the point evokes ascension, the possibility to rise. 

“It helped to give them dopey names: Big Wolf and Greasy Wolf. It helped Dave see them as creatures, wolves hidden under costumes of human skin, and Dave himself as a character in a story: the Boy Taken by Wolves. The Boy who Escaped and made his way through the damp woods to an Esso station. The Boy Who’d Remained Calm and Crafty, always looking for a way out.”

The psychological effects of Dave’s trauma appear early on; to cope with the horrific event he survived, he must dissociate. This quote establishes early on that Dave will develop something similar—if not exactly—to a depersonalization/derealization disorder. This disorder is indicated by a recurring sense of detachment from one’s physical or mental processes. As Dave grows into adulthood, his dissociative state persists and causes him to feel like an observer of his life.  

“Not all of them muttered ‘Homo’ when he passed in the hall or used their tongues to push against the insides of their cheeks. In fact, a good number of Dave’s fellow students just ignored him. But in a way, that was worse. He felt marooned by the silence.” 

Dave’s abduction and molestation was traumatic in itself—and the treatment he endured from his community when he returned only worsened that traumatic injury. From this treatment, Dave is taught that his abduction “others” him. It also teaches him to repress his pain instead of dealing with it, which proves to become dangerous for him. Overall, the quote emphasizes that the stigma that accompanies sexual assault—particularly that which is applied to boys and men—can be nearly as damaging as the assault itself.  

“He watched the faces in the bleachers most—the disgust and defeated fatigue, the fans looking like they were taking the loss more personally than the guys in the dugout. […] when the team lost, that collective hope crumbled into shards and any illusion of unity you’d felt with your fellow parishioners went with it. Your team had failed you and served only to remind you that usually when you tried, you lost. When you hoped, hope died.” 

This quote first works to convey Dave’s deeply engrained pessimism and represents his afflicted state of mind. It reveals that he’s accepted disappointment as a constant state of being in his life. Baseball is used throughout the book in association with Americanism and boyhood, making it an apt vehicle to represent the disillusionment that accompanies growing older. For Dave, he’s accepted that he’s been losing his game for a long time, and it is better to just expect the loss than face the pain of failure.

“Dave, she’d come to believe, needed his lies, needed to rewrite his history and fashion it in a such a way that it became something he could live with and tuck far away. And if it made him a better person—a loving, if occasionally distant, husband and attentive father—who was to judge?” 

Here, Celeste perceives Dave’s dissociation to his own life. This first proves that Dave’s pattern of lying has not gone as unnoticed as he believes. It also demonstrates Celeste’s own willingness to overlook the minor flaws in her husband. Ironically, though, it is her inability to overlook his lies that leads to his death; because she has already practiced not addressing the lies her husband tells, Celeste is not equipped to address the lie she thinks he’s told to cover up murdering Katie. Though this would be difficult for anyone to address, Celeste, as indicated by this quote, is particularly unsuited for confronting her husband about truths. 

“You felt it in your soul, no place else. You felt the truth there sometimes—beyond logic—and you were usually right if it was a type of truth that was the exact kind you didn’t want to face, weren’t sure you could.” 

Here, Jimmy touches on the power of intuition. In this case, he is right: Katie is dead. However, Jimmy’s intuition fails him for the rest of the narrative, most notably in detecting Katie’s killer. His desire for vengeance obscures his judgement and blinds him from the “ugly truths” he isn’t ready to face—that Katie’s murder may have been karmic, or that it was simply and tragically random. 

“She snatched the lug wrench out, then rattled it through the rags and cans of cleanser just to be sure, quite aware that her fear was silly, but determined nonetheless, because, hey, that’s why they called them phobias. She hated sticking her hand into low, dark places; Rosemary had been terrified of elevators; her father had hated heights; Dave broke out into cold sweats whenever he had to descend into the cellar.” 

This quote represents the deep psychological imprint fears have upon a person. As a text that examines great fears, the narrative emphasizes how fears and trauma determine a person’s actions. Here, Celeste, without realizing, articulates another lasting effect of Dave’s trauma. Though we may rationally know there is nothing to fear, phobias grip the psyche nonetheless. With Dave, however, his phobia is more of a physical expression of his trauma.

“And the worst thing wasn’t the victims—they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who’d loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on, shell-shocked, hearts ruptured, stumbling through the remainder of their lives without anything left inside of them but blood and organs, impervious to pain, having learned nothing except that the worst things did, in fact, sometimes happen.” 

Sean’s thought process here reflects the narrative’s goal to demonstrate the far reach of trauma. A traumatic event affects everyone involved differently, but each life is forever changed. In this way, grief is positioned as its own form of trauma. By likening grief to zombiehood, Sean captures how soul-crushing losing a loved one is. 

“I’m just saying there are threads, okay? Threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected. Say it rained in Dallas and so Kennedy didn’t ride in a convertible. Stalin stayed in the seminary. Say you and me, Sean, say we got in the car with Dave Boyle.” 

After identifying his daughter’s body, Jimmy observes that the death of his daughter feels connected to something in his past. However, what this quote accomplishes is establishing the novel’s contemplation of the legacy of the past. It is difficult to pin down the origin of a single moment to a previous event, but the three main characters consistently attempt to do so. They all come back to the day of Dave’s abduction, making that the source of almost any woe. In this way, the novel questions the long-term ramifications of an event and the length of time before they are revealed. 

“He wanted to tell him that he had also thought about what would have happened if they’d climbed in that car. That the thought of what could have been his life sometimes haunted him, hovered around approaching corners, rode the breeze like the echo of a name called from a window. He wanted to tell Jimmy that he occasionally sweated through his old dream, the one in which the street gripped his feet and slid him toward that open door. He wanted to tell him he hadn’t truly known what to make of his life since that day, that he was a man who often felt light with his own weightlessness, the insubstantial nature of his character.” 

This quote builds upon the meditations of the previous, but in a manner that is specific to Sean. For him, the lasting imprints of Dave’s abduction are the contradictory emotions of guilt and relief—guilt for not having protected Dave or gotten in the car with him, and relief for having escaped what Dave suffered. Here, Sean’s guilt and relief are manifested in the dread of imagining what his life might have been like if he’d been abducted. Sean betrays an awareness that his narrow avoidance of the abduction was merely chance in his sense of self as being insubstantial, or illusory—a single event could have altered his entire identity.  

“’Cause it’s a transmittable disease, you know? You get it ‘cause someone did it to you. And you go and pass it on. Like leprosy.”

This is the first moment where the text represents pedophilia as a disease, particularly as a contagious one. This framing is so frequent that it becomes a motif to represent stigma and adjacently comment upon the cyclical nature of abuse. This specific presentation, though, is inherently problematic because it assumes that survivors of abuse are condemned to become abusers themselves, which is not true. Rather, what Whitey perhaps means to say is that those who suffer childhood abuse are statistically more likely—but not absolutely likely—to repeat the behavior than those who have not. This can be attributed to a multitude of things, but the novel contextualizes this as being caused by the repression of trauma. In not dealing with his trauma, Dave’s desires to become an abuser reflect more his need to reclaim power, innocence, or—as he claims—receive some “compassion” (335). However, Whitey’s statement works mostly to perpetuate the stigma applied to survivors of molestation and to highlight how unfair stigmas such as this can retraumatize and revictimize survivors.  

“Too tired to care about one dead girl because there’d be another after her. And another. And sending the killers off to jail—even if you got them life—didn’t yield the appropriate level of satisfaction anymore, because they were just going home, to the place they’d been heading all their dumb, ridiculous lives, and the dead were still dead.” 

Sean’s pessimism is presented here as realism. His career has instilled a practiced apathy within him, a coping mechanism so that he can continue to work on horrific cases. It also reveals the psychological toll this line of work can have on a person. The quote works more successfully to convey Sean’s misanthropist tendencies, which contributed to the dissolution of his marriage. After seeing the worst of humanity, Sean has come to accept that that is all that is out there.   

“The Boy Who’d Escaped from Wolves and Grown Up was an animal of the dusk that moved through wooded landscapes, silent and invisible. It lived in a world that others never saw, never faced, never knew or wanted to know existed—a world that ran like a dark current beside our own, a world of crickets and fireflies, unseen except as a microsecond’s flare in the corner of your eye, already vanished by the time your head turned toward it.”

The Boy, the one who Dave puts his trauma on, is described as a feral creature because he imagines him as existing only in the woods. The woods, here, are used to represent the darkest corners of Dave’s subconscious. The Boy begins resurfacing because that is exactly what trauma will do when unhealed; it will reemerge, and the pain will be worse because it was left to fester. Furthermore, Dave’s description of the Boy conveys his sense of being hunted. The feral child lurks in the corners of his mind, waiting for a moment to pounce. 

“She had been married to Dave for eight years, and she’d always thought his secret world would eventually open for her, but it hadn’t. Dave lived up there in the world of his head far more than he lived down here in the world of everyone else, and maybe those two worlds had seeped into one another so that the darkness of Dave’s head had spilled its darkness onto the streets of East Buckingham.” 

This quote demonstrates the damage secrets wreak within a relationship. The major issue in Celeste and Dave’s marriage is their inability to productively communicate; both harbor their own secret thoughts and neither are willing to open up, more so on Dave’s part. Celeste is conditioned to accept this division from her husband, but rather than it decreasing over time, the gap between them only widens. Therefore, this quote foreshadows Dave’s coming demise; darkness will indeed spill from Dave, and, because neither one of them communicate their thoughts, it will lead to his death. 

“I’m going to kill him, Katie. Somehow, I’m going to find him before the police do, and I’m going to kill him. I’m going to put him in a hole a lot worse than the one you’re going into.” 

Rather than foreshadowing, Jimmy offers a prophecy; his need for vengeance is so strong that he must and will exercise it through violence. In this way, this passage emphasizes the role revenge plays in driving the narrative. It also articulates the severity of Jimmy’s pain, which he can only satiate through the suffering of others. Jimmy’s need for violent revenge alludes to his history of implementing his own justice. First, he sought release from grieving Marita, now he will seek the same for Katie. 

“The person you love is rarely worth of how big your love is. Because no one is worthy of that and maybe no one deserves the burden of it, either. You’ll be let down. You’ll be disappointed and have your trust broken and have a lot of real sucky days. You lose more than you win. You hate the person you love as much as you love him. But, shit, you roll up your sleeves and work—at everything—because that’s what growing older is.” 

Annabeth is a clever and perceptive woman. She notices details that others miss and is constantly underestimated in her ability to detect and endure the seedy actions of her family. Here, she offers a brutally honest account of relationships that reveals a bit about the relationships in her life. As a woman raised in a family of men involved in crime, she is particularly well-positioned to speak on the complications of loving someone who may not deserve it. Additionally, Annabeth’s advice about loving through adversity foreshadows her response to Jimmy’s murder of Dave. 

“I’m talking about Henry and George. They took me for a ride. A four-day ride and they buried me in a cellar with this old ratty sleeping bag on a stone floor, and, man, Celeste, did they have their fucking fun. No one came to help old Dave then. No one burst in to rescue Dave. Dave had to pretend it was happening to someone else. He had to get so fucking strong in his mind that he could split it in tow. That’s what Dave did. Hell, Dave died. The kid who came out of that cellar, I don’t know who the fuck he was—well, he’s me, actually—but he’s sure as shit not Dave. Dave’s dead.”

This is where the severity of Dave’s state of mind is truly revealed. He snaps, opening up to his wife for the first time about his abduction in the least productive manner. Dave’s account represents the death of his innocence; in abducting and molesting him, the two men killed the boy he was. This reveals that the person Dave is now is someone entirely different than who he really believes he was meant to be. This indicates his trauma and reinforces the novel’s consideration of the ways events dictate who we become. 

“He would tell himself that he was not going to become Henry and George. He was better than that. He was raising a son. He loved his wife. He would be strong. This was what he told himself more and more every year.” 

This quote demonstrates the full impact of Dave’s trauma. It is particularly torturous for him to have to fight pedophilic thoughts and desires, himself being a victim of molestation. Dave suffered a horrific ordeal, but his revelation that he has been harboring pedophilic tendencies is extremely concerning. It complicates him further, moving his character from afflicted to potentially afflicting. Perhaps, then, this is added to Dave’s character to symbolize the legacy of trauma and articulate that it will resurface—sometimes, the behavior itself will appear—when the person has not had the opportunity to heal from it.  

“People were stupid. They killed each other over the dumbest things […] It was knowing how stupid they really were that was a cop’s best weapon. Let them talk. Always. Let them explain. Let them unload their guilt as you plied them with coffee and the tape recorder reels spun.” 

This quote considers guilt from an alternative perspective. Rather than exploring it through someone who is dealing with it, Sean’s thoughts reveal how guilt may be used advantageously. As the novel demonstrates through the characters who grapple with guilt, it can have a profound impact on their behavior. This quote articulates this through the lens of police procedure. It also foreshadows the real reason behind Katie’s murder: People will indeed kill one another “over the dumbest things.” 

“In killing someone, he’d killed that weak part of himself, that freak who had lain in him since he was eleven years old, standing in his window, looking down at the party they were throwing on Rester Street in honor of his return. He’d felt so weak, so exposed at that party. He’d felt people were secretly laughing at him, parents smiling at him with the fakest smiles, and he could see behind their public faces that they privately pitied him and feared him and hated him […]”

Because Dave couldn’t work through his trauma in a healthy manner, he endeavors to do it through violence. He interprets the effects of his trauma—and the event itself—as a weakness to be stamped out. This is not inherent; he learns to see it this way from how others responded to his abduction. Being too young to fully understand what happened to him, Dave turned to the adults around him, but they all chose to put on fake smiles and neglect what he’d been through. 

“And that was one of the great things about a place like the Flats, the thing he feared would be lost—the way old feelings and entire pasts could be laid to rest with time, as you aged, once you realized that everything was changing and the only things that remained the same were the people you’d grown up with and the place you’d come from. The neighborhood. May it live forever, Dave thought as he opened the door, if only in our minds.” 

This quote captures Dave’s profound—if momentary—change. He expresses hope and a fondness for his community that he’s never expressed before. Though he has only ever suffered mistreatment and isolation from this neighborhood, his drunkenness creates an unreasonably auspicious vision of the future. This change is employed to contrast with Dave’s reality; his hope is a false promise. 

“Fear had found a place in Dave and never left, and so he feared doing wrong and he feared fucking up and he feared not being intelligent and he feared not being a good husband or a good father or much of a man.” 

The toxic side of masculinity appears often throughout the novel, but most notably with Dave. His molestation and his suppressed pedophilic desires make him doubt his own sense of manhood. For the former, it is more the effects of his trauma that, in his mind, compromise his masculinity. Surrounded by men who embody traditional understandings of masculinity, Dave feels the severity of his own lack; the fear and shame that permeate his existence are at odds with his longing to fulfill his role as patriarch and navigate society in the same way that these men do. Here, Lehane demonstrates the damaging impression fixed conceptions of manhood and masculinity leave upon a psyche.  

“I cannot come back from this. I cannot cheat or slide away from this. I cannot beg my way out or hide behind my secrets. I cannot expect a reprieve based on sympathy. Sympathy from who?” 

This is Dave’s most vulnerable moment. It’s a moment that really emphasizes his own humanity through his desperation to exist. Nor does it make him appear weak, as he thought he was. In fact, he is strong in his ability to understand the inevitability of his death. Dave’s final moments represent the indifference of death itself; it comes whether someone deserves it or not.