Both the Lambs and the Pickleses are haunted by their traumas and persistent feelings of guilt and remorse. By showing the characters reckoning with their pasts over the years, Cloudstreet illustrates not only how trauma and guilt can affect people their entire lives, but also that healing can occur when people connect with others and make an effort to move forward. All of the Lambs have been traumatized by Fish almost drowning, and most of them share the guilt for letting his once-clever mind fade away beneath the water. Fish becomes a constant, living reminder of the trauma of that night, and the crushing guilt the other Lambs feel for losing him. And yet, it’s framed as a positive thing when, more than 20 years later, Quick isn’t able to protect Fish from falling into the river again—the river “swallows” Fish, and this is framed as a positive, healing event, rather than another tragedy that compounds the Lamb family’s pain. In letting him go, the novel implies, they’re able to move on.
Ultimately, both families begin to heal from their traumas and move past their guilt when they recognize similar flaws in one another and join together, creating something new as when Quick and Rose marry, creating their own new nuclear family unit. The most literal manifestation of lingering trauma in the novel is the pair of ghosts that the library, but even these miserable spirits are released and unbound from the house when Rose gives birth to her and Quick’s baby in the same room. Likewise, the ghosts of the families’ painful pasts are banished as new life and fresh hope for the future enters their lives.
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Trauma and Guilt ThemeTracker
Trauma and Guilt Quotes in Cloudstreet
Fish will remember. All his life and all his next life he’ll remember this dark, cool plunge where sound and light and shape are gone, where something rushes him from afar, where, openmouthed, openfisted, he drinks in river, whales it in with complete surprise.
It’s just them in this vast indoors and though there’s a war on and people are coming home with bits of them removed, and though families are still getting telegrams and waiting by the wireless, women walking buggered and beatenlooking with infants in the parks, the Pickleses can’t help but feel that all that is incidental. They have no money and this great continent of a house doesn’t belong to them. They’re lost.
She wondered if it wasn’t really the way things were, everything just happening by chance in this sorry world. That knife spinning. She thought about her poor dead brother and the ashes and bones of her mother and sister, of Fish, the farm and every other bad turn that led to this night in a strange street and a makeshift kitchen.
The war’s over, he knows, but he picks up sadness like he’s got a radar for it. The whole world’s trying to get back to peace but somewhere, always somewhere there’s craters and rubble and still the lists and the stories coming home as though it’ll never let itself be over. There’s families still on this street who’ve lost men, and while they remember the war will still be on.
He wondered what he’d done to turn Quick away. He secretly hoped for an end to it like the return of the son in the story and it made him wonder if he wasn’t still half believing. Those Bible stories and words weren’t the kind you forgot. It was like they’d happened to you all along, that they were your own memories. You didn’t always know what they meant, but you did know how they felt.
Well the Shadow was on him, the Hairy Hand of God, and he knew that being a man was the saddest, most useless thing that could happen to someone. To be alive, to be feeling, to be conscious. It was the cruelest bloody joke. In the dark, night after night, he raised his mangled fist to the sky and said things that frightened him.
He’d spent years arresting people for things both mild and maniacal. He’d been to war and lived a Depression on the land, been a father and a husband, and this week, even an adulterer, but it counted for nothing because here he was with Beryl Lee on the end of his bed beggin the question: why was it that he didn’t know a thing about the underlying nature of people, the shadows and shifts, the hungers and hopes that caused them to do the things they did?
She felt the Shadow in her, this dark eating thing inside, like an anger, and sensed that it’d always be with her. But Quick would hold her up beyond reason, even when it went into stupidmindedness. It wasn’t just the fact that she knew he could do it for her that made her love him. It was her certainty that he would.
I’m behind the mirror and in different spaces, I’m long gone and long here but there’s nothing I can do to stop this. Every time it happens, on and on in memory, I flinch as that brow flinches with the cool barrel suddenly upon it. The sound goes on and on and matter flies like the constellations through the great gaps in the heavens, and I haven’t stopped it again.
The room goes quiet. The spirits on the wall are fading, fading, finally being forced on their way to oblivion, free of the house, freeing the house, leaving a warm, clean sweet space among the living, among the good and hopeful.
Rose remembered the way she took command of a situation in a dozen crises—when Dolly was sick, when she herself was hurt, and she couldn’t think why the very strength of that woman’s actions felt so unforgivable. Her kindness was scalding, her protection acidic. Maybe it’s just me, thought Rose, maybe I can’t take it from her because my mother never gave it to me. What a proud bitch I am. But dammit, why does she always have to be right and the one who’s strong and the one who makes it straight, the one people come to? Why do I still dislike her, because she’s so totally trustworthy?
But it’s not us and them anymore. It’s us and us and us. It’s always us. That’s what they never tell you. Geez, Rose, I just want to do right. But there’s no monsters, only people like us. Funny, but it hurts.
