The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

“You cannot begin too early to bring the power of language to children whose grasp may be precarious…A person communicates by giving as well as by taking, by listening and by expressing what is inside.”

The advice of this doctor, one of a series of experts that the Sawtelles consult to help understand Edgar’s mutism, underscores the novel’s larger interest in the necessity of communication. It provides context for Edgar’s efforts to connect with his family and his dogs through sign language and his invented language system.

“Edgar got the idea that Claude and his father had slipped without their knowing it into some irresistible rhythm of taunt and reply whose references were too subtle or too private to decipher.”

As in Hamlet and all of its re-imaginings, at the center of Edgar Sawtelle is a palpable but nevertheless mysterious tension between two very powerful and very different brothers. All of the usual dynamics that Edgar considers—good/evil, powerful/weak, heart/head, moral/ immoral—never quite lead him or the reader to understand exactly the nature of the brothers’ complex relationship.

“This is the place for peace. Come to Starchild Colony.”

Always just beyond the world of the Sawtelle kennel is this fetching place apart, which Edgar sees advertised on television. The colony is a place that, unlike the Sawtelle farm, promises community, coexistence, and respect for individual identities. Edgar flees to Starchild Colony, only to realize that running off to such places is not the answer.

“A-n-a-a-a”

At the moment when he most needs communication skills, language fails young Edgar. He cannot communicate with the telephone operator after he finds his father dying in the barn. This failure of communication haunts Edgar. He never forgets this moment of vulnerability and blames himself for the death of his father.

“The snow had stopped falling but the wind rushed against the barn, whirling the dry snowflakes into frigid galaxies. Clouds hung low over the trees, the sky barricaded and gray.”

Much like many Shakespearean tragedies, the novel uses both setting and weather to create emotional, psychological moods. Gar is dead. There descends on the kennel murky clouds that suggest the unsettling reality of never knowing how or why he died. Nothing less than the galaxy is in sync with the darkness descending on the farm. Black and white are gone. The world now fades into ambiguous gray.

“He wasn’t scared of the funeral preparations. What scared him was sitting at home, alone, knowing he wouldn’t have the energy or the concentration to do anything but look out the window and think.”

After his father’s death, as he struggles to handle what he sees as his complicity in the tragedy, Edgar reveals the brooding mentality associated with Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet. Edgar lapses into an uneasy depression, suspended between returning to his farm routines and pondering the cosmic implications of the sudden, inexplicable death of the father he loved.

“‘Who said anything about fair?’ His mother’s voice cracked a little on the word. He could guess her thoughts: how exactly might the word ‘fair’ apply to any part of their situation?”

If the novel is a coming-of-age story, this conversation with his mother begins Edgar’s education into the world of contradictory morality. This is a world where right and wrong, good and evil, and fair and unfair simply do not direct events. Trudy is considering selling the farm to help pay for Edgar’s college education despite Edgar’s protestations that such a move would be unfair.

“I also feel compelled to say that it is breathtakingly naïve to imagine creating a breed of dog in the first place…Yours is a common vanity, one that every breeder has indulged during a weak moment.”

At the heroic center of the novel is the ideal to which three generations of the Sawtelle line have defined as their goal: the ambitious—and impossibly naïve—notion that a dog breeder could actually create a new breed of dog. Reminiscent of the egomaniacs who so often make for caricatures of the evil scientists, the lofty goal, grounded in hard science, makes heroic the Sawtelle vision of a dog both physically and morally superior.

“And Trudy and Edgar, encapsulated in mourning, somehow forgot to care for one another, let alone her. Or if they knew their heartache overwhelmed them…And she without the language to ask.”

This is thought by the Sawtelle family dog Almondine. The book credits the dog with insight beyond what the human Sawtelles possess. Loyal to the family and generous in her great heart, Almondine sees how important the mother/son bond needs to be in the wake of Gar’s death, to shelter the family and farm from the insidious invasion of Claude.

“Instead of raindrops, he saw a man.”

Edgar’s transition from childhood to adulthood is made more compelling because of the multiple interventions from his deceased father. Hearing strange noises during a fierce rainstorm, Edgar goes to the barn and there engages with a vision of his father, who reveals to his stunned son the reality of his death from poisoning. This moment marks the first time the narrative admits without irony the intrusion of the supranatural, which elevates the family tragedy to its cosmic proportions.

“Do you think there is a heaven or hell?”

Confused by the visitation from his father, Edgar struggles to share with his mother the implications of seeing the ghost and the revelation that his father was murdered by his own brother. This question, which Edgar poses during dinner the next day, reveals that the boy has glimpsed the morally complicated world. He tries to find some logical reason to believe in the Christian vision of right and wrong. It is a question, not an affirmation.

“All at once blood was roaring in his ears. He understood that an idea had slowly been dawning on him, parceled out over the course of days in bits and pieces.”

This moment in which Edgar realizes he can use his trained dogs to expose the villainy of his uncle proves to be his tipping point. To this moment, Edgar has been pulled between possibilities because of his doubts over seeing the ghost of his father and the implications of the syringe. Edgar decides to rise to the challenge of a world of moral complexity and dangerous paranoia.

“It has brought on a sudden, suffocating desire to recall his father’s memories, those memories he’d held so briefly. He closed his eyes, pressed his palms to his head.”

It can be difficult to remember that Edgar is only 14. Here, he struggles to specific moments of bonding with his father that might help flesh out his aching grief over his father’s death. When the shopkeeper assures Edgar how fortunate he was to have had Gar as his father, Edgar wants nothing more than to summon memories to justify that sense of his father.

“Water’s always moving—that’s the view I try to get. If it’s not falling, it’s coming up through the ground getting ready to fall again. That comforts me.”

This wisdom comes from someone not associated with the farm and therefore free of the family’s melancholy and paranoia. The buyer from Texas offers this insight which counters Edgar’s growing sense of a world forever pulled toward the inevitability of tragedy. This offers a vision of world forever fluid, never allowing any single event to define, much less stop, that wonderful kinetic energy.

“He was going to need a map soon. They were still in the Chequamegon, but if they made steady progress, they wouldn’t be for long.”

The dense woods into which Edgar runs with his three yearling pups represents the dark and scary world of adulthood, full of uncertainties and anxieties. Adulthood is a world without a map, much like the vast woods of the Chequamegon. The quote captures the growing uncertainty in Edgar’s heart over his increasingly vulnerable position.

“Call it what you will…but this is definitely not ordinary.”

The sweet and endearing Henry Lamb was dismissed by his fiancée as too bland and ordinary to be worthy of love. Here, he reveals how extraordinarily unordinary the events at his cabin are. Henry helps Edgar’s wounded dog and marvels at the animal’s discipline and trust—a rare combination, he argues.

“‘What’s a ten-letter word for augments vision? Starts and ends with s.’”

In patiently working his crossword puzzle, Henry Lamb suggests in his unassuming way the strategy for how Edgar might cope with the increasingly confusing reality of his family. Edgar offers the answer: spectacles. The solution then is corrected vision, not blindness. Returning home and adjusting is the answer to Edgar’s puzzle.

“The day feeling was bad, no question, but the night feeling was the real killer—a bleak sledgehammer to the soul, as if some stranger had whispered a terrible secret into his ear, and that secret was how death was senseless and inevitable.”

Glen Papineau, a sheriff, emerges as a critical secondary character. Haunted by the circumstances of his father’s death, Glen obsesses over finding the truth even if it involves essentially kidnapping a 14-year-old. Here, Glen struggles with doubt and paranoia, elements central to the fall of the Sawtelle family. Like Edgar, Glen cannot accept that his father’s life meant nothing. Someone must be held accountable. 

“Are you paying attention? We need to get out in the open. Now.”

The tornadoes that stop Edgar from running to Canada symbolize how the cosmos itself cannot allow the boy’s flight away from complications and difficult moral dilemmas. Nothing less than a massive freakish windstorm convinces Edgar to return to the farm. The caution Henry offers is telling: It is time to clear the mystery and get things out in the open.

“She stood broadside in the gravel and turned her head and asked her question. Asked if it had seen her boy. Her essence. Her soul. But if the traveler understood, it showed no sign—”

According to the novel, dogs have souls and awareness. Almondine’s death is offered through the perspective of the loyal family dog herself. Searching for Edgar, her master and friend, she ends up on the road, and even as the car barrels down on her, she hopes that someone in the car might be able to help her.

“You couldn’t change a river into a sea, but you could trace a new channel for it to follow.”

This wisdom, offered by Trudy as Edgar and Claude are moving toward their showdown in the fiery barn, reveals her rationalization for turning to the affection of her brother-in-law. He is no Gar, but maybe she could make him a better person. The naivete of her assessment of the sociopathic Claude is revealed within moments, as Claude stabs her son with the poison-filled needle and then leaves him to die in the fire. 

“I love you.”

The only words that Edgar speaks are directed not to his loving mother or to one of his beloved dogs. They are directed at the ghostly figure of his father he sees as the flames and smoke overwhelm him. Despite the approach of death, this is a moment of happiness, as he expresses himself to the one figure in his life who provides constant love and devotion.

“This was hypoxia, hallucination, smoke rapture—what happened to oxygen-starved divers.”

Amid the conflagration caused by his own nefarious scheme, Claude resists accepting that his dead brother was in any way involved in what is fast becoming his death. Confused by the sudden descent of heavy black smoke, Claude clings to rationality when he glimpses in the smoke the figure of his brother. This marks the moment when Claude is at last held accountable.