19 pages • 38 minutes read
Jon LoomisDeer Hit
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Deer
For centuries of poetry in English, deer represent freedom, beauty, and a strain of unattainable wildness that cannot be subjugated, even in death. From Wyatt’s “Whoso List to Hunt” and its depiction of Anne Boleyn as one of the king’s protected deer, to the now-commodified Monarch of the Glen and its association with human traits like integrity and nobility, deer images represent elusive, intense independence and unreachable superiority. In “Deer Hit,” a careless driver destroys a deer with at least some measure of intent, acknowledging in the end the deer’s beauty. The driver takes part in the deer’s connection to harmony, nature, and virtue the only way he can: by hitting and killing it. The driver cannot see the deer individually at first, only the “road full of eyeballs” (Line 6), ethereal like “small moons glowing” (Line 7), otherworldly and remote. By the time he can appreciate the deer’s “beautiful body” (Line 45), he kills it and dumps its remains in the woods. The narrative becomes a desecration of nature and nobility. What the driver cannot possess, he destroys, leaving throughout his life “a trail of ruin” (Line 52).
Car
As a cultural symbol, cars represent life’s acceleration in the 20th century, the increased access to privacy and isolation, mechanization against nature, and freedom. The independence the car allows for the 17-year-old driver denotes a different kind of freedom than the one the deer stands for; the deer calls up an image of untamed, natural freedom, while the car offers escape and power.
Placing the deer inside the car not only puts the driver’s safety at risk, as well as presenting practical problems; the action creates an unnatural containment of wild nature in a mechanized imitation of wild freedom. The car’s model, a “Fairlane wagon” (Line 2), adds more to the symbolic profile, using a domestic vehicle designed for families as the instrument of power and destruction. The wagon image harks back to frontier wagons, taming and colonizing the West.
The car in “Deer Hit” also belongs to the driver’s father. The car represents something physical borrowed from the father, reinforcing the less-tangible items the father lends: alcoholic rage, frustration, and a tendency toward violence.
Television
The poem’s narrative borrows motifs from American movies and television, especially gangster and horror stories. At the beginning of Part 2, after the chaos of Part 1, the unsuspecting father waits up for the driver “watching tv” (Line 34). Television and the act of watching television symbolizes an absence from life, a vicarious experience of action.
The father participates in the driver’s violent act mostly as a spectator. His comment “It’s Night of the Living Dead” (Line 37) identifies him as a viewer, as he names the entire incident after a movie he might watch on late night programming.
