Cheryl’s stepfather. A kind, hardworking carpenter several years Bobbi’s junior, Eddie was the one to instill in Cheryl and her siblings a love of nature and the outdoors when they were still young children by taking them on camping trips and building them a rural home in the Minnesota Northwoods. Though Eddie nurses his wife Bobbi through her illness and serves as a source of support to Cheryl, after Bobbi dies, Cheryl is unable to stop Eddie from drifting away. Soon, he marries a new woman with children of her own and remains emotionally closed-off from Cheryl and her other siblings in spite of their shared inability to cope with the loss of their beloved mother. Together, Eddie, Leif, and Karen represent one of the novel’s most potent themes: loss, grief, and distance.
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Eddie Character Timeline in Wild
The timeline below shows where the character Eddie appears in Wild. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1: The Ten Thousand Things
...up some prescriptions that would ease Cheryl’s mother’s pain. They waited along with Cheryl’s stepfather, Eddie, shell-shocked and disbelieving.
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...were poor, Cheryl’s mother always insisted they were “rich in love.” Cheryl’s mother eventually married Eddie, a kindhearted carpenter eight years her junior. Together with Eddie—using the funds from a work...
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...and her marriage on the backburner in order to care for her ailing mother while Eddie continued working to pay the bills.
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Chapter 2: Splitting
...fill out a form including the address of her next of kin. Cheryl writes down Eddie’s address, though her connection to her stepfather has grown frayed and distant in the years...
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Chapter 10: Range of Light
...them that her father left and her mother is dead. She doesn’t tell them about Eddie—but feels bad for not mentioning him, and begins reflecting on all the ways in which...
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...strength to move forward. Three years after Cheryl’s mother died, when Cheryl went to visit Eddie one day, she was shocked by how thin and wan Lady had become. It was...
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Cheryl told Eddie that Lady needed to be put down, but Eddie refused to pay for a vet...
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Chapter 13: The Accumulation of Trees
...Minnesota, and when she went to visit Leif at their old house, she found that Eddie and his friends had carved their names and some random phrases into the wooden dining...
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Chapter 19: The Dream of a Common Language
...in early, Cheryl sits by the fire and burns the novel as she thinks about Eddie—the person who taught her how to make her first campfire, paddle a canoe, and skip...
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