Tin Man

Both Ellis and Michael possess great love for each other, but they take different courses in life, leaving them with regrets over their failure to pursue their potential relationship to the fullest extent. Tin Man is unique in its nonlinear approach, for Winman does not depict Michael and Ellis’s love chronologically but rather through the echoing, hazy chambers of memory. The novel presents their relationship through disjointed firsthand accounts of the characters’ time together and the regret that creeps in when they are separated by circumstances, fear, or death itself at various stages of the story. From the very beginning, it is clear that Ellis struggles without Michael, whose presence is central to Ellis’s happiness. In their earlier moments of separation, Ellis realizes, “Life was not as fun without Michael. Life was not as colorful without him. Life was not life without him. If only Ellis could have told him that then maybe he would have returned” (71). The bitterness of this passage shows that Ellis loves Michael deeply but only comes to recognize that love through Michael’s absence. Without Michael, Ellis’s relationship with Annie suffers, and his life becomes unappealing. Later, when both Michael and Annie are gone forever, Ellis’s regrets eat away at him as he struggles to navigate the challenges of a lonely life without them. Because the absence that marks his love is now permanent at this point, his regret over missed opportunities is all the more severe.

Likewise, Michael’s journal entries about earlier times show that he too has always been bereft without Ellis, and even though he tries to replicate the love he feels for Ellis with others, he never achieves the same feeling. When he initially sees G, he follows the man because G reminds him of Ellis; later, as they grow closer, Michael works to transform their relationship into the life that he had always hoped to build with Ellis. Although this goal fulfills his emotional needs to a certain degree, it also gives rise to the inexpressible sadness and regret that comes with knowing that his entire life with G is merely a fabrication. As Michael himself admits, “It was everything Ellis and I had once planned. It was beautiful and, occasionally, it hurt. I told G that, and he laughed and the fantasy ended” (117). With G, Michael can pretend that he is living the life he briefly experienced in France, but jarring differences constantly remind him that his current situation is not the same and never can be. As a result, he keenly feels his long-standing regrets over his failure to tear Ellis away from the toxic influence of his father. Even when he tells G how he feels about their relationship, G’s casual dismissal of this momentous confession ruins the careful balance that Michael maintains between reality and fantasy. Whenever his current relationship fails to replicate the emotional overtones of the time he shared with Ellis, Michael is left with nothing but the harsh reality of what he can never have.