49 pages • 1 hour read
Kimi Cunningham GrantThese Silent Woods
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Cooper, aka Kenny Morrison
Cooper, the first-person narrator of the novel, is a veteran of the War in Afghanistan who has been diagnosed with PTSD. He cares deeply for his daughter, and her protection is his central motivation throughout the novel. However, that motivation had, in the past, led him to violence when he broke into the home of his late partner’s parents to kidnap his own child. He is prepared to kill both Scotland and Marie on first meeting them, drawing his gun on both. When Cooper reflects on his first encounter with Scotland, he expresses having been “disturbed” by the way his mind took over: “Disturbed by the fact that the idea of killing him swam to me so easily, that it felt like a natural solution” (17). He blames his willingness to kill and his ruthlessness on the war he fought, thinking:
This is who you are now. There was a time when you would cringe at Aunt Lincoln skinning a deer. Blood, muscle, fascia, bone: you couldn’t stand the sight of it. You would position yourself to the side and turn your head. Not anymore (17).
As a grown man and war veteran, however, he is able to hunt for food, repair the cabin, track their supplies, and make contingency plans to hide or escape if they are discovered, doing whatever is necessary to protect Finch, even though he knows that much of his actions are symptoms of paranoia.
Cooper is also stubborn and his combative qualities that help him survive in the woods also make it impossible to live among other people. During a PTSD-induced panic attack, he pulled out a gun in a diner and refused the suggestion from Cindy’s father that he seek professional help. Cooper assumes that Judge’s recommendation is self-serving: that he “could take credit for solving everything, for helping the poor wounded warrior” (167). Cooper’s need for control prevents him from accepting help.
Cooper transfers his inability to adapt to society after the war onto his daughter, taking her and fleeing into the wilderness instead of attempting to keep her through legal means. His battle conveys the theme of The Inescapability of the Past, as he refuses to deal with his PTSD and his wife’s death and instead takes Finch and flees. However, throughout the course of the text, he changes. After the disappearance of 17-year-old Casey Winters brings the outside world to him, Cooper is faced with the decision to continue to hide, flee, or face authorities. He decides that he is finished living in isolation. Although he is ultimately stopped from going to the authorities by Scotland’s sacrifice, what is important is that he has realized the futility of their situation and the issues that surround continuing to live in the cabin and is willing to admit his mistakes to make things right. In the Epilogue, Finch reveals that her father allowed her to meet her grandparents two years earlier than planned, even though he was resistant to the idea.
Ultimately, however, Cooper changes throughout the novel. He realizes, after Casey’s death, that these consequences have begun to impact other people and have a larger impact on Finch than he had anticipated. In contemplating how to move forward, he thinks:
Though I wasn’t the religious type, I’d always believed there was an after. Answers you had to give, maybe. Explanations. I’m not saying heaven or hell per se, but a time of reckoning. My ugly soul would face what it had coming and there was no way to explain my way out of what I’d done, but even then I suspected there was a worse alternative, too: that living with the weight of my own actions would be its own sort of hell. Which it was. Is (256).
These thoughts from Cooper summarize the novel’s portrayal of what it means to run from the past instead of facing the consequences. For Cooper, the “weight” of what he did turned into his own “hell,” as his actions and failure to own up to the consequences of those actions impacted his life, Finch’s, and now Casey’s, ultimately convincing him that he needed to finally take responsibility for what he had done.
Finch, aka Grace Elizabeth Morrison
Finch is Cooper’s precocious eight-year-old daughter. Cooper describes her as “an exquisite little creature, with her blond hair and her eyes like water, clear and changing, somehow green and gray and blue all at once” (103). She never knew her mother, who died when Cooper crashed their car into a tree when Finch was a baby. Finch is intelligent in both the literary and the practical sense. She is well-versed in 19th-century literature and poetry, as she has read all the books that are at the cabin multiple times. Additionally, she has learned from Cooper about how to survive in the wilderness and knows how to hunt, skin deer, and place traps for smaller animals. Additionally, Cooper notes how the ability to survive in the wilderness is “in her blood, something inherent and primordial, instinctual, whereas I had to learn all of that. How to be quiet, how to move undetected, how to watch and see it all and also to wait” (100). Unlike most eight-year-old girls, Finch is adept at survival and has the instincts that are needed to do so.
Unlike Cooper—who is willing to do whatever it takes to keep their lives going, even killing Scotland or Marie—Finch is kind and compassionate, as is reflected in the novel’s opening by her grief over the death of one of their hens and the way she cares for her kitten, Walt Whitman. She also immediately trusts Scotland and grows a friendship with him, as well as becoming close to Marie in the few days that she is there. This kindness reflects her desire for human connection, conveying the theme of The Desire for Connection in the Midst of Isolation. Ultimately, it is this desire which leads to her obsession with Casey. Once she realizes that Casey has died, she becomes fixated on helping her and immediately decides they need to go to authorities, despite the danger it may cause to her father and their lives in the cabin. These thoughts are in direct contrast to her father, who takes several days to think about their situation, search for alternatives, and even considers not telling anyone where Casey’s body is.
Marcus “Scotland” Barnes
Scotland is Finch and Cooper’s closest neighbor. The first time that Scotland visits Cooper, Cooper is unsettled by him, noting how there was something “shifty and scrappy” about him, and that he was “otherworldly, something not quite real” (15). Cooper is also unsettled by Scotland’s ability to simply appear from nowhere without being heard, even by Cooper who is adept at being vigilant and noting his surroundings. Throughout the novel, Scotland visits Cooper and Finch, and repeatedly does things that unsettle Cooper: he brings newspapers that mention Cooper’s kidnapping Finch, he talks to Finch about the bugs he has which eat human flesh, and he even comes over to their cabin, breaks into it, and is found by Cooper holding Finch when he comes back from the store. As a result, Cooper is suspicious of Scotland, convinced that he is the one who is leaving footprints by their chicken coop, that he trespasses onto their land and dropped the lens cover, and that he uses his spotting scope to regularly spy on them.
Through a plot twist at the climax of the novel, Scotland turns out to be friendly and saves Cooper from turning himself in to the police. Cooper learns from a bystander at the police station that Scotland is a former preacher, who “lost his wife and daughter” in a car accident while he was driving (259)—which explains the tattoos of a woman and a girl on his arms (16), and the feminine clothing he uses to wrap his gifts for Finch (37), as well as his penchant for quoting Bible verses. These similarities between Cooper and Scotland—they both have/had a daughter, they lost their wives in car accidents when they were driving, they were in the military, and they live alone in the wilderness—along with Scotland’s “otherworldliness” convey that Scotland is a symbolic representation of a possible version of Cooper’s future. Like Cooper, Scotland has isolated himself from the world, and over the years has grown lonely and seeks human connection through Cooper and Finch. It is clear, then, why Scotland sacrifices himself to save Cooper from going to the police: so that Cooper can keep his daughter and not end up in the same position that Scotland is in, alone without Finch and isolated.
Marie
Marie is Jake’s sister. She arrives at the cabin to bring supplies for Cooper and Finch, something that Jake had asked her to do as he was dying. Cooper initially sees her as “scrawny,” with “curly brown hair” (135). After her husband divorced her and Jake died, she felt she had little in her life other than her job as a school librarian. As a result, she followed Jake’s directions to bring supplies to the cabin—knowing very little about it and despite her hesitation to do so.
Marie is kind and compassionate. Although she knows little about Cooper and Finch, she lies to Finch to ease her grief about Jake’s death, telling her that her brother considered Finch a daughter. Additionally, she convinces Cooper that he needs to put aside his fears in order to speak to the police about Casey’s death, appealing to Cooper’s love for Finch by saying that he would want the information if that was his daughter who had gone missing.
After she learns what Cooper did to end up at the cabin, she does not judge him for it but recognizes that he is running from the consequences of his actions rather than owning up to what he has done. She believes that he owes it to Casey to tell the police what he knows and does her best to convince Cooper of this fact. As a result, she becomes one of the driving forces that causes him to change in the text and be willing to sacrifice his safety to tell the truth. Additionally, she is the one who convinces Cooper to allow Finch to move back with her grandparents to finish high school and attend college. Finch explains that “she pointed out that there were significant benefits to be had with connecting with my grandparents” (269), causing Cooper to change further and allow Finch to reconnect with the world.
