The opening chapters establish Joe as a fundamentally flawed person whose difficult past has left him with a willingness to pay The Cost of Doing the Right Thing and a tendency to misjudge the consequences of his own impulsive decisions. As the plot accelerates, Eskens further complicates the issue of ethics, for whenever Joe strives to uphold his ethical code on a grand scale, his actions give rise to a wealth of entanglements and moral quandaries in his personal life. For example, when he writes a news article accusing State Senator Todd Dobbins of domestic violence, he must contend with the complex fallout of this decision, which affects the lives of many different people. In this matter, his only witness has chosen to remain anonymous, and his case is further weakened by the fact that Mrs. Dobbins has signed an affidavit denying her husband’s abuse. When Allison explains the potential threat that the lawsuit represents to Joe’s future in journalism and asks if his source will come forward, Joe’s unvoiced thoughts reflect his iron grip on journalistic ethics. As he muses to himself, “My source […] dangled in my grip, trusting that I would not let her fall. Unmasking her identity not only would break a promise that I had made, but would cost her everything. Some lines can’t be crossed” (6). The resolute tone of Joe’s thoughts reveals his willingness to risk his own future for the sake of another person’s safety, but his chosen moral stance also bears a grievous cost. In short, his actions have threatened his editor’s career as well as his own, and he must now contend with the realization that the potential loss of his job will place his own household in an even more precarious position.

Yet despite Joe’s strong moral code, his moments of harsh or inconsiderate behavior also reflect the decades of psychological scarring that date back to his fraught childhood. Haunted by memories of his mother’s frequent abuse and struggles with addiction, Joe often defines his current decisions in the shadow of his past battles, not realizing the degree to which these experiences have shaped his adult psyche. This dynamic is illustrated by his vivid flashback to his fourth-grade fight with classmate Keith Rabbinau, as the incident implies that his current focus on professional achievement comes from his need to compensate for his childhood distress over being labeled a “bastard.” When the fourth-grade Joe looks up the word in the dictionary, he shrinks in shame as he unconsciously accepts both definitions and comes to see himself as “an illegitimate child” and as “something irregular, inferior, spurious or unusual” (21). He then turns this newfound bitterness toward the father he has never met, vowing to “cram the shadow of [his father] into a box” so that “it would never again see the light of day” (24). In addition to explaining the novel’s title, this metaphor also emphasizes The Long-Term Impact of an Absent Father, portraying the adult Joe as an abandoned son who has never stopped trying to prove himself worthy in his own eyes.

Burdened by this private wound, the adult Joe is horrified anew when he encounters the report showing that Joe Talbert Sr. punched a pregnant Kathy in the stomach because she refused to get an abortion; in this moment, Joe realizes that he carries the name of a man who never wanted him to exist at all. As his bitterness erupts, Joe embarks upon an ill-considered personal quest to discover the man his father was, and in the process, he will risk undermining every positive aspect of the life that he has struggled to build for himself: his professional reputation, his romantic relationship, and his bond with his brother Jeremy.

As Joe struggles with this barrage of challenges and conflicts, his first-person narration nonetheless strives for a painful degree of accuracy, and his brief, self-conscious asides either lay his rationalizations bare or offer clear-eyed analyses of his mistakes and manipulations. For example, as he and Lila argue about their past difficulties with his mother, Kathy, and the serious impact that her misconduct has had upon both him and Jeremy, Joe rejects Lila’s position out of hand, allowing her very little voice in the discussion. He takes issue with her contention that “people change” and seeks to redirect the entire conversation with his hastily conceived plan to visit Buckley and learn more about his potential half-sister, Angel. Yet even in this moment, he is fully aware of his own manipulative tactics, for after he overrides Lila’s objections by asserting, “Angel’s all alone. She’s just a kid,” he also internally admits, “I was hitting below the belt by aiming at Lila’s soft spot for the helpless and weak” (37). This exchange serves as a blueprint for Joe’s vacillation between championing a moral cause and seeking to twist the truth into a shape that benefits him personally. Yet in the aftermath of his poorer decisions, he always retains the inner clarity to analyze his own behavior honestly and make amends where he can.

Within this brewing storm, Jeremy operates as a quiet counterweight that complicates Joe’s self-image as the family’s competent caretaker. While Joe is justifiably proud of extracting Jeremy from Kathy’s dubious care, he also acknowledges that Lila is the one who has taken on the lion’s share of the emotional labor involved in caring for Jeremy on a daily basis. He describes his life as armor that turned out to be tinfoil, saying, “I’ve been taking care of my autistic brother, Jeremy, going on six years now, and I have a girlfriend who I helped put through law school. People see those things and think, What a good guy that Joe Talbert is” (3-4). However, the next pages quietly correct the record as Joe admits that Lila educated herself about autism, got Jeremy his first job, and taught him to read by arduously introducing the activity into his daily routine. Lila’s status as Jeremy’s key caretaker is further illustrated Jeremy quotes Groot to Joe in Chapter 5, for even as Joe forces a laugh in response, he inwardly admits that Jeremy’s echolalia has begun “to wear on [him]” (32). This seemingly inconsequential moment exposes how much of the actual work Joe has handed off to Lila, even as he uses his narration to paint himself as his brother’s savior. As Joe contends with the tangled web of the AP lawsuit, his murdered father, his potential half-sister in Buckley, and Kathy’s unread letter, these stressors work collectively to destabilize the worldview of a man whose self-account is already starting to crack.