When all my soul, in its smallness and its vastness, would fall face down against the earth from the bliss of my name to the hard crosses I would be handed to bear.
Fielding is our eighty-four-year-old narrator. He’s looking back on his life and on that summer of 1984 when everything changed. I wanted to use 1984, and his age as eighty-four, for a very particular reason. In George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, he speaks about the importance of preserving individual thought against the herd mentality. During this summer of 1984, we see this individual thought threatened. Our narrator Fielding is keenly aware of this threat and this quote really represents the effect that summer had on the rest of his life.
I often get asked by readers why I didn’t give Fielding a happy ending. But it was important to me that Sal’s murder mean something. That it had lasting effects on the lives of these characters. And even more important that Sal’s life matter, even if it didn’t matter in the court system. Fielding and Sal are more than friends. They become brothers during the course of the novel. When I look at the aged Fielding, I look at a man mourning that loss of his brother. And perhaps if there had been justice for Sal, Fielding’s own life would have turned out differently. But violence affects the whole family, and the ripples of that injustice, though they may fade over time, do not completely disappear.
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