The Rest of Our Lives
42 pages • 1-hour read
Ben MarkovitsThe Rest of Our Lives
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism and illness.
The Road Trip
Tom’s cross-country road trip is an extended metaphor for the theme of Navigating Identity in Middle Age. He leaves home at the novel’s start with the intention of dropping off his daughter, Miriam (Miri), at Carnegie Mellon, staying with his college friend Sam Tierney for the night, and driving back to Westchester County. However, once Tom is on the road, he realizes how reluctant he is to return to his life, particularly because he’s on a forced leave of absence from his job (so he can’t teach for the upcoming term at the law school) and is still contemplating leaving his wife, Amy, in light of her affair 12 years ago. During his drive from Pennsylvania to California, Tom reflects on everything he has experienced and his relationships throughout his life.
Each of Tom’s stops along the road complicates how he sees himself and his impressions of his future. The road trip incites his stream-of-consciousness narration. Like the meandering movements of his mind between the past and present, his movements across the country have little organization. One stop inadvertently leads to the next. When he gets to Sam’s, he decides to travel on to South Bend to see his brother, Eric. His time with Eric then compels him to head to Denver to see Brian Palmetto, since Brian calls him while he’s in Indiana. In turn, his time with Brian prompts him to visit Jill McGurk in Las Vegas. Once he gets this far across the country, he decides to continue to California to meet with Todd Gimmell and then visit his son, Michael. None of these stops is planned ahead of time, just as each of Tom’s thought processes, reflections, and revelations lacks a definitive structural scaffolding. As Tom travels, he sees and experiences things that push his thoughts further into the past and propel him further across the country. By the end of the trip, he has changed. He realizes that he doesn’t want to be like Todd and decides to quit teaching and stop representing people like Todd. In addition, his cancer diagnosis forces him to confront his mortality and leads to his reconciliation with Amy.
Illness
Tom’s illness symbolizes both his aging process and his character’s avoidant tendencies. Tom references his symptoms throughout the novel, but never attaches much weight to them. His seeming lack of concern for his health minimizes readers’ view of his condition, despite how much the novel’s other characters worry over his well-being. He had “a mild bout of [COVID] that lasted the usual ten days, like a chest cold” (28), but other symptoms, including “palpitations,” “sudden fatigue,” “faintness,” and “a swollen face and leaky eyes” (28) continued in the ensuing months. Each time a character presses Tom to see a doctor, insisting that he isn’t okay, Tom dismisses their concern, assuring them that doctors have found nothing wrong with him. His disinterest in further investigating his symptoms shows that Tom is afraid of getting older, afraid of his own mortality, and afraid of confronting how his life is changing and the emotions that might evoke, thematically connecting his illness to The Fear of Emotional Confrontation.
At the novel’s end, Tom is diagnosed with lymphoma. This diagnosis implies that all of his faults and shortcomings have been “symptoms of a greater problem” all along. Thus, Tom’s illness becomes a metaphor for his often-bigoted viewpoints, implying that because he hasn’t addressed the symptoms, his worldview has become increasingly small, conservative, and dangerous. However, Tom’s diagnosis doesn’t push him toward any greater change than to accept his wife’s apology and agree to return home, now that he has acknowledged his mortality.
Basketball
Throughout the novel, Tom often reflects on his history of playing basketball and repeatedly engages in casual games of basketball with family members and acquaintances. In turn, basketball becomes a motif that represents Tom’s youth. Tom reclaims an essential part of himself when he’s playing the sport. Even though he’s getting older and is reluctant to accept his mortality, he can still play friendly games with his son, friends, and strangers. These games portray Tom in a more relaxed light. He’s engaged in the game, and thus more grounded in his body than in his thoughts. Playing the game lets Tom connect with his past self in the narrative present. The more he plays, the better he can reconcile competing aspects of his life and identity.
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