An Analysis Of Buried Child :: essays research papers

It&8217s amazing what a secret stinkpot do to a person. Keeping secrets among friends heap be fun, or helpful when you need to confide in someone you trust. Other secrets can do more harm than good. They can fester inside you and cause everlasting pain. In &8220Buried Child, this is the case. The family is permanently altered by their secret, which becomes a exploitation moral cancer to them, leaving each impotent in their have got way.The play takes place on Dodge&8217s farm. About xxx eld ago, the farm was fertile and prosperous. Dodge and Halie didn&8217t have a wonderful marriage, however. Things took a turn for the worse when Halie became pregnant with someone else. It is suggested that Tilden is the father. The shew to support this includes the fact that the baby was sm on the whole, and that Tilden would sing to it and take it for long walks all day, just talking to it and treating it as his own. &8220Tildenwas the one who knew. Better than any of us. He&8217d walk fo r miles with that kid in his arms. Halie let him take it. wholly night sometimes. (p. 124) Dodge would not allow this abomination to grow up and live in his family, so he drowned it, and buried it in the backyard. We can guess that this is when the farm ceased to be fertile, and fell into disuse. This is a symbol of the last of honesty and the birth of the family&8217s terrible secret.Why exactly does everything go wrong for this family? We don&8217t cognise exactly when the problems started, only we know that Ansel died on his honeymoon, Bradley cut off his own leg in a chain saw accident and is now mentally imbalanced, Tilden is nonfunctional and has been control out of New Mexico, Dodge is a crazy old pale guy, and Halie is doing shady things with the preacher. Vince is the only person capable of facing the world and life, but he too is corrupted by the secret at the end. The dissolvent to the question is that their secret, the dead child, is a secret festering them from t he inside out. It is ill-definedhow long this moral degradation took, it may have taken years for all this to happen. We do know that it has left everyone impotent. Bradley is the most vivid instance of this impotence. His false leg is his crutch, both figuratively and literally.