24 pages • 48 minutes read
Greg HollingsheadThe Roaring Girl
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Flashback
When the father tells the boy that the mother is pregnant, there is a flashback to when her appendix burst. While this happened prior to the start of the story, it continues to disturb the boy, as he anxiously watches over his parents. His fear of their illness or even death makes him vigilant for any potential signals that something is wrong. This explains his anxiety at the start of the story when he begs the parents to explain their odd behavior. The flashback haunts him until he meets the girl.
In contrast, the final, empowering image in the story is also a flashback, as the boy remembers a time when he walked with the girl. He has no idea where they were going, but in this memory he is not worried about the future nor the past. He is in the moment, basking in the fact that the girl thinks of him, if only briefly. It is enough for the boy to feel as if someone released him from obsessing over the fears of the past and the what-ifs of the future.
Limited Narrator
The story is told from the third-person, limited point-of-view of an eight-year-old boy who wants to understand the limitations of his viewpoint and expand those limited boundaries. Although the “real world” often overwhelms the boy, he usually works hard to observe and understand it. As an eight-year-old, his age and inexperience limit him, and the minimalist storytelling highlights this, as seen when he confuses “cunt” and “punt,” unaware of his mistake.
Yet the boy is also the most insightful character in the story, as he is able to see things that blind the adults. He has a sophisticated understanding of how things that at first seem strange can become familiar and “interior” once one is exposed to them repeatedly over time. He is also aware when things refuse to allow one to inhabit and understand them. The service station, for example, never transforms into the familiar; it remains mysterious and strange.
This interior point of view can isolate the boy. He feels trapped in his isolation and unable to connect to others, a condition exacerbated by his being an only child. He loves his parents but keenly feels their distance as they loom over him and speak to each other in a coded secret language that he tries to decipher.
Not until he meets the girl does he understand how deep his desire to be understood runs. Only by being truly seen by another will he feel more engaged with the world and no longer trapped in his lonely point of view.
Dialogue
The story opens with the boy watching the parents who share a secret language he struggles to understand. Even when the parents talk directly to the boy, he has a hard time following what they are saying because there is often a gap between what they say and what they mean.
The boy struggles to navigate this gap between language and meaning. It doesn’t help that the characters, especially the father, speak in fragments and short sentences, making his speech even harder to decipher.
But when the girl arrives, she speaks in blunt, profanity-laced “roars” that jolt the family, who are accustomed to quiet miscommunication and polite indirection. The girl’s first words at dinner are “I’m fuckin’ shattered” (64), and the father is so struck by the language that he can’t help but absorb her profanity in his own language.
