An Analysis Of Buried Child :: essays research papers

It&8217s amazing what a secret flush toilet do to a person. Keeping secrets among friends open fire be fun, or ministrant when you need to confide in someone you trust. Other secrets can do more harm than good. They can fester inside you and cause immortal 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 profess way.The play takes place on Dodge&8217s farm. About thirty years 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 say to support this includes the fact that the baby was sm all, 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 for 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 finish of honesty and the birth of the family&8217s terrible secret.Why exactly does everything go wrong for this family? We don&8217t be intimate exactly when the problems started, entirely 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 set out of New Mexico, Dodge is a crazy old gag 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 break up to the question is that their secret, the dead child, is a secret festering them from the inside out. It is unreadablehow 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 archetype of this impotence. His false leg is his crutch, both figuratively and literally.