APF

Under these circumstances, it is hard to accept Skipper's subsequent claim he is a "man of
courage," although he must feel that indeed his good cheer and his ebullient language are
themselves evidence of his bravery, of his ability to not merely survive the traumas his life has
inflicted but to dismiss those traumas in triumph. But the more persistent Skipper remains in his
denials, the more those denials come to seem a form of willed innocence, a refusal to
countenance human violence and depravity, even though his experience has surely demonstrated
they are fundamental conditions of existence. This refusal influences Skipper's narrative of
ongoing events as well, since he is equally reticent to report fully on what's happening to him,
leaving us frequently puzzled about the turns the narrative takes.
The narrative itself is literally bifurcated, one strand concerning Skipper's stay on an
island off the coast of Maine, the other, actually the true "present" of the novel, relating his life
on a tropical island to which he has fled, but the majority of the narrative relates how his
experience on the first island led to his retreat to the second, which is where we find him "lover
of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped."
The two islands are juxtaposed both climatologically (the first cold and harsh, the second warm
and languid) and in circumstance (on the first island more misfortune befalls Skipper, while on
the second comfort reigns — or so he reports), but beyond this thematic pairing, the trajectory by
which Skipper and his daughter Cassandra find their way to the first island and subsequently by
which Skipper becomes a resident of the second is only fitfully traced. The events that take place
on the coastal island are also recounted in an elusive sort of way, mostly because to do otherwise
would require Skipper to reveal more about the circumstances that have made Cassandra
suicidal. It would force him to reveal those of his own weaknesses and evasions that help explain
his behavior but that also would make the behavior of other characters toward him more
comprehensible as well. Skipper's treatment at the hands of the femme fatale "Miranda," for
example, would seem less unmotivated if we had a firmer sense of Skipper's habitual actions
toward and behavior around women.
But then, ultimately, Hawkes wants us to find the motivations of the characters obscure if
not absent. As in The Lime Twig, the violence and cruelty exhibited is all the more disturbing
because motives can't be discerned and thus don't explain the outbreak and intensity of violent
behavior. Hawkes's vision is of a world punctuated by violence and cruelty, and Skipper's
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