Chapter Summaries 'A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius'

Self-Consciousness and Meta Narration Guilt & Poetic License Coming Of Age, Parenthood And Responsibility Identity Death, Humour and Worst Case Scenarios • It is December, and Eggers’s mother is dying on the couch in their home in Lake Forest, Illinois. She has stomach cancer and can no longer walk, so she spends her time watching TV and spitting green fluid into a small “plastic receptacle,” which Eggers and his sister Beth take turns emptying. • The green fluid smells foul, but Eggers never comments on it. Six months ago, doctors removed his mother’s stomach, though by then there “wasn’t a lot left to removed.” Eggers notes that he would list what they had already taken out, but he doesn’t know the medical terms. Analysis: Compared to the preface and acknowledgements sections, the first chapter of A Heart breaking Work of Staggering Genius is relatively straightforward. Eggers suddenly drops almost all of his self-conscious meta-narrative techniques in order to set the scene: his mother is about to die. However, as he establishes this, he subtly reminds readers of his limitations as a writer who must rely on memory, saying that he doesn’t know the medical terms the doctors used when operating on his mother. Key Themes: • Eggers describes the progression of his mother’s illness, including the brief period after she did chemotherapy when it seemed like everything might be all right. • Her health quickly deteriorated after this brief reprieve, and now Eggers pictures black coils of cancer cells teeming in her stomach like some “unruly, sprawling, environmentally careless citizenry with no zoning laws whatsoever.” • As Eggers and his mother watch a show on TV about bodybuilders competing in athletic competitions against amateur athletes, she gets a nosebleed. Because she can’t pinch her nose tightly enough, Eggers reaches over and tries to stop the bleeding with his own hand, but it doesn’t work. Analysis: It quickly becomes clear that Eggers is one of his mother’s primary caretakers. This is a reversal of sorts, since parents are usually the ones who take care of their children. As such, Eggers shows readers the extent to which illness and tragedy can alter personal relationships, forcing responsibility on people who aren’t necessarily prepared to take on such serious duties. Key Themes: • A month earlier, Beth woke up early and went downstairs, where she found the front door open. It was late autumn in Illinois, and cold air was coming through the open doorframe. As she got closer, she saw the shape of her father outside. He was, for some reason, kneeling at the end of the driveway. Analysis: In the acknowledgements section Eggers reveals that his parents died within 32 days of one another—this moment is charged with significance, since it seems obvious that Beth is witnessing some ominous precursor to her father’s death. Eggers, it seems, is dramatizing Beth’s experience of finding her father after he’s been struck down by his illness. Key Themes: • Eggers takes a moment to describe their house, explaining that his family’s taste is “inconsistent.” In the family room, for instance, there is a recessed part of the chimney. • One day, Eggers writes, his father decided to fill this space with a fish tank. Not caring to measure the area, he miraculously bought a tank that was a perfect fit. “Hey hey!” he said as he slid it in, a phrase he liked to use after accomplishing small, strange feats. “Loser,” his family would often respond, and he’d say, “Aw, screw you,” and go make himself a large Bloody Mary. Analysis: Eggers takes a moment to give readers a better idea of what his father was like. Many sections of A Heart breaking Work of Staggering Genius contain small asides like this one, which don’t necessarily advance the plot as much as they help Eggers create a portrait of his life and the people around him. In this moment, he provides readers with a visual detail about the room in which his mother is dying, and he also offers up a snapshot of his father, indicating that he was a quirky man who liked to drink. Key Themes: • Eggers is home from college for winter break. • His older brother, Bill, has just returned to D.C., where he works for something Eggers says has to do with “eastern European economics, privatization, conversion.” • Beth, for her part, has been home all year because she deferred her first year of law school. Since she rarely gets the opportunity to go out, she likes it when Eggers is home. • Now, while holding his mother’s nose, Eggers gazes at the fishless fish tank, which is still full of gauzy water. “Would you check it?” his mother says, talking about her nose. When he lets go to look up her nostril, nothing happens for a moment, but then the blood comes. This is dangerous, because her white blood cell count is so low that her blood won’t clot. Analysis: As Eggers sits with his mother and watches TV, he still acts out the habits of ordinary life even though his mother’s situation is potentially quite serious. Since her blood won’t clot, any kind of bleeding could be fatal. Still, though, she and Eggers simply sit there and act normal. This, Eggers suggests, is what it looks like to confront the possibility of death— rather than instantly getting worked up about all the morbid possibilities, he and his mother simply wait. After all, if they always worried right away, they would never be able to live their lives. Key Themes: • When his mother’s oncologist told them that “any bleeding could be the end,” Eggers wasn’t worried. “There seemed to be precious few opportunities to draw blood,” he writes, since she spent all her time on the couch. “I’ll keep sharp objects out of proximity,” he joked, but the doctor didn’t laugh. Wondering if he heard him, Eggers contemplated adding, “No more knife fights. No more knife throwing.” However, he refrained from saying this, since this doctor doesn’t often joke. • “It is our job to joke with the doctors and nurses,” he says. “It is our job to listen to the doctors, and after listening to the doctors, Beth usually asks the doctors specific questions,” he notes. He points out that he “know[s]” he “should joke in the face of adversity,” since there’s “always humour,” but recently he’s been unable to find anything funny about his mother’s situation. Analysis: Eggers frames humour as something that helps people face “adversity,” something that can help them maintain their strength in the midst of hardship. This is why his memoir is so full of sarcasm and scathing jokes. As he previously mentioned, turning difficult things into “caricatures” helps him confront them. However, certain things—like death and serious illness—seem to resist humour altogether, though it’s worth noting that Eggers keeps trying to make jokes even when doing so proves difficult. Key Themes: • As Eggers holds his mother’s nose again, Toph comes upstairs from the basement, where he has been playing video games. “I can’t get the Sega to work,” he says. Asking him if it’s turned on, Eggers tells him to turn it off and on again, and Toph retreats once more into the basement. • Eggers then shifts gears again, narrating the moment that Beth saw their father kneeling outside. As she watched him, she noticed how slight he looked in his work suit. “He had lost so much weight,” Eggers writes. “A car went by, a gray blur. She waited for him to get up.” Analysis: When Toph emerges from the basement, readers witness the difficult position Eggers has found himself in as a result of his father’s death and his mother’s illness. Although he’s only a college student, he suddenly has to take on certain parental responsibilities, both in terms of how he cares for his mother and in terms of how he cares for Toph. ey Themes: • It has been ten minutes, and Egger’s mother’s nose has not stopped bleeding. She had another nosebleed two weeks ago, and when Beth was unable to stop the flow, she took her to the emergency room, where the doctors kept her for two days. • Even though her oncologist insisted that she stay longer, she demanded to be taken home because she is “terrified” of hospitals and fed up of having to spend time in them. Now that she’s home again, she has determined to never go back, and has even made Beth and Eggers promise they won’t force her to return. Analysis: The urgency of Eggers’s mother’s situation becomes all the more apparent as her nosebleed shows no signs of slowing down. Worse, Eggers and Beth have promised they won’t take her to the hospital, meaning that if her nose doesn’t stop bleeding on its own, she could die. By spotlighting this dilemma, Eggers shows readers the tricky balance of taking care of someone’s medical needs while also respecting their personal wishes. Key Themes: • “We are both distantly worried about the bleeding nose, my mother and I, but are for the time being working under the assumption that the nose will stop bleeding,” Eggers writes. • As he continues to hold her nose while she watches TV and spits green fluid into the small plastic receptacle, he encourages her to “talk funny, the way people talk when their nose is being held,” but she refuses, telling him to “cut it out.” Changing the subject, she asks him how school is going, and he lies, saying things are fine even though he has actually been dropping classes. “How’s Kirsten?” she asks, referring to his girlfriend. “She’s good,” he says, and even though he’s engaged in conversation, he feels a creeping sense of dread, sensing that “it’s coming.” “We know it is coming,” he writes, “but are not sure when—weeks? Months?” Analysis: Once again, Eggers tries to use humor to lighten the mood. By doing so, he hopes to make it easier to deal with this difficult situation. In this case, though, he seems to seek out humour for his own sake, not his mother’s. As such, she moves past his joke by asking him about his life, but this does nothing to help him take his mind off the sinister feeling that her death is “coming.” Key Themes: