Loss and Resilience Theme Analysis

My Boy Jack acknowledges and explores Rudyard’s grief over losing Jack—even if the play also portrays him in a negative light for prioritizing honor and duty over his own son’s life. Both he and his wife, Carrie, are already familiar with what it’s like to lose a child, since one of their daughters, Josephine, died at the age of seven. In many ways, the memory of Josephine haunts the entire family: Jack struggles to remember what she was like, Elsie often thinks about how Josephine was her father’s favorite daughter, and Carrie feels like part of herself died along with the young girl. Rudyard, in fact, is the only one who doesn’t talk about how Josephine’s death affected him, probably because he believes in standing strong and letting time heal his wounds. However, he’s not able to stoically endure Jack’s death, eventually breaking down and crying in front of Carrie. In this moment, he and Carrie are united in their grief and emotionally connected for arguably the first time in the entire play. In this way, My Boy Jack explores how difficult it is to handle profound loss with the kind of unflinching resilience that Rudyard tries to maintain, implying that grief often overcomes even the most emotionally stoic people.

In keeping with his beliefs about strength and bravery, Rudyard approaches emotional hardship with a sense of grit, clearly thinking that the only way to handle grief is to bear down and move on. When Jack comes home for his first leave after joining the Irish Guards, he tells Rudyard that he often thinks about two of his fellow soldiers who were recently killed. Opening up to his father, he says that he can’t help but wonder if they were in pain before dying. At first, Rudyard empathizes with his son, kindly suggesting that Jack is experiencing a “loneliness of the spirit,” which Rudyard recognizes is “awfully hard to bear.” In fact, he even goes on to tell Jack about a close friend he lost as a young man, explaining that his friend’s death deeply upset him and that he felt for a long time afterwards that the world was a “wicked place.” Rudyard’s comments suggest that he is perfectly aware of how hard it can be to cope with the loss of a loved one, since he himself has experienced the feelings of “loneliness” and even anger that often come along with grief.

And yet, Rudyard then tells Jack, “But you have to take your dose,” metaphorically suggesting that loss is simply a part of life and that, since it’s something everyone inevitably experiences, the only thing to do is swallow the sadness like a “dose” of bitter medicine and move on. “You sit it out,” he says. “You wait. Eventually you heal up.” Rudyard believes that emotional hardship is something that you can just push down and wait out—a mentality that doesn’t necessarily help people process difficult emotions, even if it’s true that the passage of time makes certain forms of grief easier to bear.

Unlike her husband, Carrie grapples with loss in a more straightforward way, allowing herself to acknowledge her pain instead of fixating on staying strong. When Rudyard tries to convince her that Jack died for an honorable cause and that she should see this as a comforting thing, she calls him a “cold fish.” This insult suggests that Rudyard has numbed himself to emotional hardship. Carrie, on the other hand, fully recognizes the reality of Jack’s death, that he died a horrible death in the rain while experiencing great pain. Instead of trying to move on without dwelling on the ghastly details of her son’s death, she lets herself feel the overwhelming grief of this loss.

Ironically, Carrie’s willingness to actually feel sad and distraught in moments of emotional hardship is more courageous than Rudyard’s supposedly resilient way of handling grief. Simply put, Carrie is more honest about her anguish because she confronts her feelings, whereas Rudyard just tries to bury his in the name of a show of strength. When their first daughter, Josephine, died at the age of seven, Carrie seemingly tried to act resilient in a similar way, since she says that she “sewed up the wound” and moved on. Now, though, after Jack’s death she doesn’t hide the fact that she feels “more dead than alive,” and though admitting to having these feelings won’t make her pain go away, she is—at the very least—allowing herself to mourn Jack instead of trying to maintain a stiff upper lip.

To that end, even Rudyard can’t quite stay completely strong in the face of his own grief. He points out that Carrie believes in an afterlife and should therefore take comfort in the idea that Jack’s soul still exists, to which Carrie responds, “But I miss him.” In response, Rudyard says, “So do I,” and it’s at this point that he cries about Jack’s death for the first time. The fact that he cries just after he straightforwardly admits to missing Jack underscores how powerful it is for him to simply acknowledge his emotions. No matter how badly he wants to show resilience and strength, nothing will stop him from missing his son. In this moment, Rudyard joins his wife in grief. They grieve not alone, but together. Yet moments later Rudyard tells Carrie that “We’ll manage.” The implication is that he will go back to “managing” his grief, to keeping that stiff upper lip. The comment in the play feels tragic, a retreat in which Rudyard had the chance to truly connect with his wife but retreated back into stuffing his emotions down and hiding them away. In this ending, the play suggests that Rudyard’s “strength” is in fact weakness, that his resilience in the face of the griefs of the world is in fact a refusal to actually engage with the real world, and that in “managing” he isn’t entirely living.