63 pages • 2-hour read
When the Wolf Comes Home
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Themes
The Struggle to Be Brave
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, child death, and child abuse.
Jess and the boy wrestle with fear throughout the narrative. Both characters initially believe that they are controlled by their fears, which in turn feeds their negative self-image and makes them doubt themselves. Throughout the novel, Jess must confront the struggle to be brave as she seeks to protect both herself and the boy from the creature.
Jess struggles with her inner voice’s accusations of cowardice and her intense fear of abandonment. She has turned to improvisational comedy as a means of working through her fears but still struggles to feel brave and self-assured when off the stage. Jess suppresses her own needs because she is afraid of being abandoned the moment she decides to focus on herself, which illustrates how her fears spring from her complicated relationship with her father: Cookie accuses Jess of putting others’ needs ahead of her own to ensure that others will not abandon her the way Tommy did. Jess finds a mirror to her fear in the boy, who is trying to navigate his own complicated relationship with his father. Jess makes a crucial comparison between them in Chapter 35 when she says that she and the boy are alike because they are often consumed by fear.
As the novel progresses, Jess gradually begins to demonstrate the bravery and agency she once believed she lacked. Despite clear and repeated signs of the grave danger she is in—including the violent massacre of her neighbors, Margie, and Cookie—Jess consistently chooses to keep protecting the boy instead of abandoning him for her own safety. Although she struggles with fear and self-doubt, she maintains enough self-control to hide her struggles from the boy and is a kind, reassuring presence to him throughout their escape. Even when she comes face-to-face with the creature, she forces herself to stay by the boy and tries to protect them both by channeling his powers. In risking her own life to protect someone small and vulnerable, Jess proves that she was never the coward she feared she was.
At the end of the novel, while surrounded by terrifying figures that embody her fear of failure and abandonment, Jess sends herself to an improv stage. There, a child version of herself encourages her to internalize the principles of improv and to accept that her bravery is real. Instead of giving in to her fear, Jess becomes more confident, accepting that she can use her newfound powers to affect the world in positive ways. In choosing bravery over fear, Jess frees herself from the self-doubt and self-loathing that has undermined her for so many years.
Navigating Familial Cycles of Violence
Jess and the boy have both experienced familial cycles of violence and trauma. Jess is haunted by her father’s neglect and abandonment of her, while the boy lives in intense fear of his father’s anger. As the boy and Jess try to outrun the creature, Jess seeks to break the traumatic cycle instead of perpetuating it so that both of them can be freer and happier.
The boy’s relationship with his father embodies familial violence and trauma at its most extreme. The boy lost his mother at birth and has been raised in isolation and fear by Calvert, his controlling and dangerous father. Calvert has raised his son in secrecy, completely depriving him of other social connections and trying to exercise strict control over him. Calvert is also violently abusive: He killed the friend whom the boy created from shadows, forcing him to watch. Calvert also emotionally abused his son by repeatedly telling the boy that he was inherently “bad” and should not be alive, which increased the boy’s fear, confusion, and self-loathing. The boy’s ability to transform his father into a literal monster through his fear of him symbolizes both the emotional and physical threat posed by familial violence.
Jess’s dynamic with the boy represents a healthy alternative to the perpetuation of these violent and traumatic familial cycles. While Jess is often confused and fearful of the boy’s abilities, just as Calvert is, she does not allow her fear to sanction any harmful conduct toward the boy. She instead becomes a loving surrogate mother to him, modeling restraint and self-sacrifice as she seeks to protect him from Calvert. Despite the risks to her own life, she continues to shield him instead of abandoning him to the authorities or leaving him to his fate. When the boy confides in Jess about what his father told him about his supposedly inherently “bad” character, Jess counters this negative self-belief by urging the boy to see himself as capable of good, which helps the boy gain more confidence and define himself apart from his father’s controlling beliefs.
Jess’s relationship with the boy thus represents a way of breaking the familial cycle of violence, opening up the possibility of a brighter future for them both. This possibility is cut short when Calvert corners them and the boy chooses to reconcile with him, which leads to his death at Calvert’s hands. The end of Calvert’s family reinforces the destructive nature of familial cycles of violence, suggesting that those who do not break free from these harmful cycles are ultimately consumed by them.
Nature Versus Nurture
One of the recurring questions that the novel raises about the boy is whether he is inherently bad by virtue of what his powers are capable of or whether he has the potential to choose good. The boy initially believes that he is bad because his father has repeatedly insisted that he is. Jess, by contrast, attempts to convince the boy that this is not true and that the boy has agency in choosing who he will be. Through this conflict, When the Wolf Comes Home explores the debate between nature versus nurture.
Several characters in the novel see the boy as an inherent threat by nature, especially the boy’s father and Santos. Calvert tells the boy that he is “too bad to be alive” and spends the novel chasing his son because he wants to kill him (124), believing that the boy could never be anything but irredeemably “bad.” While Santos has more empathy for the boy’s situation, he also tends to share Calvert’s belief that the boy is, by default, a dangerous problem that cannot be solved. While it is not clear exactly what Santos expects the scientists at Project Albatross to do once the boy is caught, Santos’s conversation with Jess about the Ursula K. Le Guin novel subtly reveals that he sides with the scientists and believes that the boy might have to be sacrificed for the greater good. Thus, both Calvert and Santos deny the boy any agency or potential to develop, condemning him based on their ideas about his inherent—and inalterable—nature.
Jess represents an alternative view, believing in the power of nurture and agency to effect positive change. In Chapter 26, Jess assures the boy that he isn’t bad but simply complicated. Instead of responding to his powers with fear and violence, as Calvert did, Jess attempts to see the positive potential in such powers and urges the boy to start doing the same. When the boy realizes that Jess loves and cares for him, he starts to reconsider his own feelings toward himself. As the novel progresses, he becomes more hopeful, beginning to believe that he might be able to define himself on his own terms instead of accepting his father’s harsh verdict.
The novel’s ending shows the boy fully accepting Jess’s view instead of his father’s. Although the boy feels defeated by what he has done to Santos, Jess assures him that she sees good in him. When the boy insists that it is too hard for him to be a good person because of his powers, Jess insists on his potential: “As long as you’re alive, you’ve still got […] Hope. Time. A chance to turn things around” (244). The boy’s attempted reconciliation with his father illustrates his newfound belief in the power of people to change and his desire to express his own good intentions, while his father’s inability to believe in nurture over nature ends in both their deaths. Despite the boy’s tragic ending, the novel suggests that he and Jess, in believing in the power of nurture and their own agency, achieve a measure of self-development and emotional freedom that is denied to characters who see nature as inescapable.
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