The History of Sound: Stories

In “Graft,” Shattuck recontextualizes his explorations of the past within the protagonist Hope’s third-person narrative account. In this short story, Hope encounters reminders of her buried past in the form of a child who resembles her estranged son Eli. Although 12 years have elapsed since she left her son with Davis and Annabelle, Hope is immediately tugged into memories of her former life when she sees the boy at the museum. The child acts as a metaphor for The Clarifying Power of History—in this case, of Hope’s personal history. Ever since Davis and Annabelle refused to let her see Eli again, Hope has tried to block out her past, so much so that she’s never “told Harold about Eli, or about Sam, or her years in western Massachusetts where she’d met Sam, or even that she had a brother” (74). In hiding her past from Harold, Hope has created the illusion of a new life and identity for herself. She has tried to negate her fraught personal history by denying its existence and withholding these truths about herself from her new husband. Despite Hope’s decades-long attempts to prove otherwise, the boy at the museum reminds Hope that her history cannot be erased and will always live on inside her.

Much of Hope’s desire to bury and deny her past is inspired by her shame. The third-person limited point of view enacts this aspect of Hope’s internal experience. Specifically, Hope feels ashamed of herself for getting pregnant outside of marriage, something that would have been culturally shunned in the late 1800s. She also feels ashamed for having become involved with Sam, a married man with a family, and failing to recognize his deception. Further, she feels ashamed of being a single mother and of abandoning her child with her brother and sister-in-law. Unable to remedy these facets of her past, Hope has convinced herself that pretending these experiences never happened is the only way to overcome her shame. However, in keeping the truth from Harold, she is inadvertently repeating what Sam did to her. Indeed, Sam never talked “about his life” or “his childhood, or about his parents” (81). He too believed that one’s history could be erased if he simply didn’t acknowledge it. The outcome of Hope’s story proves that the individual’s history will always resurface in the present, with or without acknowledgment.

In these ways, “Graft” can be interpreted as an analogy for a nation’s history. In the context of American (and specifically New England) history, denying the region’s violent past doesn’t wipe out the evils of this era. Instead, “Graft” implies that if a nation denies her history, the same cycles of violence will only recur. The recurring images of flowers, trees, plants, and grafts throughout the short story reinforce the narrative’s analogous possibilities, reiterating the Biblical adage that “what you sow you will reap.” Just as a place’s soil dictates what can be grown there, how a person regards her past influences who she becomes and the relationships she has for the rest of her life.