36 pages • 1 hour read
Mary HoodHow Far She Went
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1984A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaStory 9: “Inexorable Progress”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 9 Summary
From the opening lines of the concluding story of the collection, the third-person omniscient narrator makes references to the protagonist’s impending suicide attempt. The protagonist, Angelina, is compared to a dying tree in winter—by the time one realizes it is not simply winter-barren but actually dying, it is too late.
The story opens as Angelina attends Sunday service. Her mind races through the minute details of her misery—the lost passion between her and her husband, Chick; the stillborn baby; the nightmares about her dead mother’s casketed corpse making its “inexorable progress toward the dark, the sealing, the lowering, the losing sight” (104); and the self-inflicted, irritating pressure to provide her daughter, Bonnie, with “Santa, and the Easter Bunny [...] and happily ever after all [her] life” (110).
She recalls the lump in her breast and the disappointment when Chick told her it was benign. As she proceeds through the daily details of a comfortable life, she becomes exceedingly uncomfortable. She hints to her friend, “I bet I could tell you I was going home and pipe a bottle of Valium” (112). However, as the narrator tells the reader, “But Angelina didn’t have her mind made up; she was still trying” (113).
After the death of her dog—the only companion who helps Angelina to forget how hard it is to be happy—Angelina makes up her mind to stop trying. She takes care of all the family errands, drives to the outskirts of town, and shoots herself in the chest. She aims for her heart but is sitting up and misses. Her suicide note is addressed: “To Whom It May Concern” and contains nothing but a reference to a passage in the Bible (122). In the final scene, she opens her eyes to Chick watching her in a hospital room and claws at her IVs.
Story 9 Analysis
It is not until the final story of the collection that the action taken to confront the quiet suffering of a false and empty life is done with intention and determination. Ironically, the protagonist still fails to achieve her aim, shooting herself but not fatally.
The story recounts a series of empty interactions—the people, places, and things that symbolize life and love. However, neither of these is present for Angelina. Her nightmares are about her dead mother’s inexorable progress to burial and decomposition; her dreams are about escaping emptiness. Both she and the narrator make references to her own inexorable progress to closure. Meanwhile, those around her who choose to accept what life has offered them with complacency believe Angelina to be making inexorable progress to the same resignation as they have—a notion that horrifies Angelina.
One of the few authentic interactions for Angelina is with JoJo, the family dog, which she refers to as her second child. Unlike Bonnie or Chick or her neighbors and friends, JoJo does not require a performance from Angelina. Instead, JoJo takes Angelina’s mind off the fact that she must constantly try to be alive. As in many of the stories preceding, it is the loss of the innocent and genuine, as experienced in the death of a dog, that is the final trigger. Angelina shoots but misses the mark and lies in her hospital bed, “vulnerable but valiant, like a little beast who would gnaw off its own foot to escape the trap” (123). The ending comes as even more heartbreaking than the attempted suicide; Angelina is reduced to an animal clawing savagely at her IVs; her life is a foreign, unwanted thing, and its intrusion is symbolized by Chick and his act of looking in at her.
