The Home, Bud Caldwell’s name for his orphanage, is the site of many of his worst memories and symbolizes profound isolation and loneliness throughout the novel. It is where he’s forced to live after his mother’s death, and so its name is particularly ironic since it is not a true “home” as much as it is a waiting room or temporary lodging for Bud as he goes between foster homes. While a home often suggests the place where one can go to feel a sense of familiarity, trust, and love, the Home is quite the opposite. For one, Bud is distrustful of the other children in the Home, evidenced by his insistence on counting and recounting the things in his suitcase to make sure everything is accounted for, especially with “more and more kids coming into the Home every day,” and his insistence on sleeping with a jackknife. It is also the place in which Bud’s isolation from a family and people that care for him is the starkest. To belong to the Home means that there is no true home nor family for him to return to.
Bud ultimately rejects the kind of lonely existence that the Home symbolizes. He goes on the run, choosing to take his chances finding a makeshift family for himself instead of allowing himself to accept the inadequate (and sometimes outright abusive) version of a home and a community that the Home gives him. In doing so, Bud realizes that he has the power to redefine what a true home, one built around community, familiarity, should be.
The Home Quotes in Bud, Not Buddy
This was the third foster home I was going to and I’m used to packing up and leaving, but it still surprises me that there are always a few seconds, right after they tell you you’ve got to go, when my nose gets all runny and my throat gets all choky and my eyes get all sting-y. But the tears coming out doesn’t happen to me anymore, I don’t know when it first happened, but it seems like my eyes don’t cry no more.
It’s at six that grown folks don’t think you’re a cute little kid anymore, they talk to you and expect that you understand everything they mean. And you’d best understand too, if you aren’t looking for some real trouble, ‘cause it’s around six that grown folks stop giving you little swats and taps and jump clean up to giving you slugs that’ll knock you right down and have you seeing stars in the middle of the day. The first foster home I was in taught me that real quick.
RULES AND THINGS NUMBER 118
You have to give adults something that they think they can use to hurt you by taking it away. That way they might not take something away that you really do want. Unless they’re crazy or real stupid they won’t take everything because if they did they wouldn’t have anything to hold over your head to hurt you with later.
“I’m sorry, Bud, I didn’t mean to scare you, but everybody knows how you like to sleep with that knife open so I figured I’d best grab holt of you so’s you wouldn’t wake up slicing nobody.”
The Home Symbol Timeline in Bud, Not Buddy
