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.
Themes
Violence and Control
“Deer Hit” questions the accidental nature of accidents. A sufficient number of bad decisions make the poem’s driver, speaker, “you” figure culpable for the chaos and damage to himself and others. His father waits up for him, making similar bad choices and becoming angry. Both characters could be classified as careless, the violence random, the damage secondary and unintended.
But the driver gathers up the mortally-wounded deer “like a bride” (Line 21), describing the deer in terms that connect it intimately to him in a relationship of love and dependence and using the language of a transitory life stage—the positive connotation of “bride” clashing eerily with reality of the deer’s transitory state. Instead of fleeing his carnage like a careless person, he enfolds it and brings it home with him like a trophy. The driver struggles internally in Lines 43 through 46, attempting to frame his reasoning. He questions himself, providing two theories, not as explanations but as excuses: “what can you tell him” (Line 43). The driver knows why he brought the deer home rather than abandoning it in the road. His destruction demands commemoration. “Some things stay with you,” the driver offers in Line 50, obliquely providing the true reason he brings home souvenirs of his violence.
Evidence exists—the father’s alcohol rage, the driver’s own underaged drinking and driving “at 3:00 a.m.” (Line 3)—that this character lacks the sense of control needed for a fully-realized identity. In the absence of that control, he seeks out ways to see the evidence of his actions through violence. In the final lines, the driver embraces the emblematic “dent/in your nose” (Lines 51-52) and the “trail of ruin” (Line 52), the physical proof of his choice, his identity. Lacking any remorse beyond his brief moments considering how to explain his behavior to his father, who pointedly doesn’t ask for explanation, the story’s ending on that trail of ruin suggests the reader has been led into a situation more dangerous than any other in the poem: listening to the confession of a sociopath.
Arguably the most famous car accident in American literature, the one in The Great Gatsby resulting in Myrtle Wilson’s death in the Valley of Ashes, never resolves as accident or murder. F. Scott Fitzgerald depends on the reader to judge Daisy’s power and agency. She may be careless, as narrator Nick Carraway (care-away) claims, but Nick diminishes her power only because the alternative seems too terrible to consider. In “Deer Hit,” the driver diminishes his own power, even turning the story over to the reader in second person narrative delivery, as a means of escaping reality. This figure causes destruction, stares into it, and derives pleasure and beauty from it. His final sentence comes as close as possible to confessing his sociopathic nature without stating it directly.
Brokenness and Frailty
The voice in “Deer Hit” presents complication; the speaking individual functions as a character in the narrative, not necessarily a speaker in the poem. The second person narrative delivery further complicates the question of identity and voice, as well as the assignment of accountability. The poem’s structure itself, then, breaks and complicates a story of destruction.
The poem’s “you” represents the driver’s experience; the observations and assessments belong to him. From the first line and his “tunnel-vision drunk” characterization, the driver points out every flaw and frailty in himself and in his environment. His ongoing observation of the injured deer in lines 18 through 33 shows him monitoring its life force with striking detail. The driver charts vulnerability around him with the urgency and precision of a PTSD survivor or sociopath, and the reader must observe him with the same attention to detail.
Frailty offers the driver a vulnerable spot to exploit, whether it’s the injured deer or his impaired father, whose horrified reaction to the injured deer the driver recounts with scrutiny and specificity: “Jesus, he says. A long silence./Son of a bitch, looking in” (Lines 40-41). While the driver may not revel in his father’s reaction, he studies and reports on it with care and interest. Once the driver manages to fracture or break something, he reports on its condition with equal interest and focus. His own injuries, the “headlight dangling, side-mirror gone” on his father’s car (Line 25), the deer’s sounds of agony and tortured movements he renders in nuance and complexity. The aftermath yields the most poetic moments in the narrative, as the driver only appreciates the deer’s vital beauty when he knows he’s going to kill it: “color of wet straw, color of oak leaves” (Line 46). Burying the evidence acquires a romantic power, as he compares himself to a gangster in line 51. Even his own physical body’s damage, the “dent” (Line 51) in his nose, reminds him of that power, becomes evidence of his presence and impact.
Death
The driver figure in “Deer Hit” inhabits the space between injury and death with excitement and anticipation. While the poem’s animating force could come from a sense of duende, the proximity of dying and death heightening a sense of vitality, this character assigns much of his identity to his ability to achieve destruction and “ruin” (Line 52).
Stories that start in “dark woods” (Line 4) almost always involve monsters and the supernatural. Before the accident, the driver describes a “road full of eyeballs” (Line 6), a chilling, disembodied gaze. At death’s threshold, the deer “scrambles to life” (Line 29), and “appears like a ghost” (Line 30). The father turns from the television to call the driver’s appearance “Night of the Living Dead” (Line 37), identifying him as the undead himself, predatory and terrifying, detached from humanity.
Coming of Age
The bewilderment of the teenage accident and the father’s behavior suggest a morbidly ironic coming-of-age tale in which a 17-year-old with their own vehicle—and the brash confidence to drink while driving it—comes literally crashing into a reality he is unprepared to handle. Through this perspective, the prolonging of the tragedy by bringing the deer back home becomes less so a calculated move, and more a naively desperate attempt to fix that which cannot be fixed. The driver goes from confident, carefree, and reckless, to a child bringing their disasters home in the hope that their father can put it back together. The irony is of course that by the time he arrives home, it’s clear the father is no more capable of undoing the accident than he is. Indeed, the only difference between father and child is that the father has enough experience—and emotional numbness—to finish the job, as violent as it is. In this sense, the events of the poem are a brutal rite of passage, alongside other cultural rites of passage like drinking for the first time and getting your own car. This is the second crash in the poem: crashing into adulthood, crashing into responsibility, crashing into the realization that your parents, like you, are flawed and powerless in the face of death. This is growing up.
