When the Cranes Fly South

Sixten is an important figure in Bo’s life and a key symbol in the narrative, representing The Need to Preserve Agency in Old Age. Bo says plainly what the dog represents when others question the wisdom of keeping him, erupting in anger at the latest suggestion that he should be taken away by demanding to know “what the hell the point of life [i]s if [he] [i]s too old for a dog” (14). For a man who has always had dogs, to relinquish one is not merely to give up a pleasure but to acknowledge that certain forms of care are now beyond him. 

Sixten also becomes the symbolic terrain on which father and son negotiate their unspoken injuries. Bo recognizes the linkage in the very idiom he uses to defend himself, stating that he does not believe that he will be able “to fix a single bloody thing if [Hans] takes Sixten away” (10). The sentence braids a practical claim—that dogs need walking, feeding, and grooming—with an emotional one—that nothing can be set right without the animal. It also invokes many discussions that Bo had with his own father, in which he failed to assert his authority in a way that