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Chapter 3
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Self-Consciousness and Meta-Narration
Coming of Age, Parenthood, and Responsibility
Death, Humor, and the Worst-Case Scenario
Identity
Guilt and Poetic License
Summary
Analysis
It’s Friday night, and Eggers thinks about how he’d like to go out. Unfortunately, he knows he can’t, since he and Beth aren’t yet comfortable leaving Toph with a babysitter. This has made it hard for him to date, though even when he does meet people, he’s mercilessly critical of them. To him, everyone must act perfectly, especially since he and Beth have decided they won’t bring anyone home who hasn’t first proved him- or herself. If Eggers does something with a date that he thinks Toph might enjoy, he brings him, and if his date doesn’t like this, then he begins to dislike her, thinking she must be “self-centered.” This is only one of many tests. Others have to do with how his dates respond to the fact that both of his parents are dead, and how they react upon entering his and Toph’s dirty house.
One of the hardest things about raising Toph as a twenty-one-year-old is the fact that caring for a child greatly curtails Eggers’s romantic life. Worse, he and Beth refuse to get babysitters. This is most likely because they’re afraid Toph will feel abandoned by them. As such, readers see how their parents’ deaths still influence them in very practical everyday ways. Trying to raise Toph while also maintaining a healthy social life, Eggers once again finds himself straddled between two identities: that of a responsible parent and that of a young bachelor.
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Toph gets out of school on Fridays at noon, so Eggers takes work off to spend the afternoon with him. On days like these, they play basketball, have dinner, and eat ice cream. Each night, Eggers reads aloud until Toph falls asleep. Tonight, he turns around before slipping out of the room and says, “So. Big day, huh?” “Yeah,” Toph replies, delivering a brief summary of everything they did, which includes the open house described in the previous chapter. “I mean,” Toph continues, “it was almost as if it was too much to happen in one day, as if a number of days had been spliced together to quickly paint a picture of an entire period of time, to create a whole-seeming idea of how we are living, without having to stoop (or rise) to actually pacing the story out.”
This is the first time since the book’s acknowledgements section that Eggers allows himself to leave the primary narrative and explicitly comment on the way he’s telling the story. However, he does this by couching his meta-narrative analysis in the story itself, having Toph deliver the critique as if they’re having an ordinary conversation. In this way, he enables himself to acknowledge the fact that he has “spliced together” “a number of days” in order to better tell his story. Once again, then, readers see Eggers’s self-consciousness regarding his own manipulation of reality.
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Defending himself against Toph’s criticism, Eggers claims that they’ve had “plenty of days like” the one he has just described. He then points out how difficult and frustrating it is to try to “adequately relate even five minutes of internal thought-making,” let alone entire periods of time. “So you’re reduced to complaining about it,” Toph says. “Or worse, doing little tricks out of frustration.” Toph calls these tricks “gimmicks, bells, whistles.”
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Continuing his critique of Eggers’s narrative style, Toph suggests that the problem doesn’t have to do with “form,” but rather with the fact that Eggers is “completely paralyzed with guilt about relating all this in the first place.” He posits that Eggers feels “somehow obligated” to tell his story even though he knows their parents would strongly disapprove. Having said that, though, he concedes that Beth would probably say that this guilt is very “middlebrow, middle-class, [and] midwestern,” something both Catholic and “unique to the home in which” Eggers grew up. Toph points out that Eggers hasn’t even told many of his closest friends the stories he’s now putting out into the world in the most public way possible. “For instance,” he says, “your father being in AA was not to be spoken of, ever, while he was in and after he stopped attending.”
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Toph suggests that Eggers thinks of himself as quite “open” but that, in reality, this isn’t necessarily the case. “You believe that you and me are the New Model, that because of our circumstances, you can toss away all the old rules, can make it up as we go along,” he says. “But at the same time, so far you’ve been very priggish and controlling, and for all your bluster you end up maintaining most of their customs, the rules imposed by our parents.” Continuing, Toph points out that Eggers is very unforgiving, recounting a conversation he had the other day with his friend Marny, who—after Toph failed to call home to tell Eggers he would be late—urged Eggers not to ground him. Eggers did not respond well to this, saying that Marny had no right to critique his style of raising Toph.
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Toph says that Eggers is driven by anger, which is perhaps the result of having grown up in a “loud, semi-violent alcoholic household.” Eggers, he says, clearly sees his guardianship role as a chance to “right the wrongs of [his] own upbringing.” Expounding upon this, he says that Eggers has the “opportunity” to “do everything better.” Although this chance to “show up one’s own parents” is something everyone can eventually to do with their children, in Eggers’s case this notion is more pronounced, since he’s now bringing up Toph, who is also his parents’ “progeny.” “It’s like finishing a project that someone else could not, gave up on, gave to you, the one who could save the day,” Toph adds.
Toph says that Eggers likes to pretend they’re “lower class” because they receive “Social Security and live in a messy house with ants and holes in the floorboards.” He says that Eggers likes this “underdog stance” because it increases his “leverage with other people.” When their conversation finally ends, Eggers shuts Toph’s door and putters around the house instead of writing. He adjusts the rug and the cover on the couch, then gets a popsicle from the freezer and steps outside onto the back porch. Next door, his neighbors are having a small get-together, and although they kindly invite him to join, they are older and he’s uninterested in socializing with them, so he makes up an excuse about waiting for a phone call before sliding back inside, where he looks nostalgically at all the furniture they took from Illinois to California.
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