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Chapter 3
Themes
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.
Themes
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.
Themes
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.”
Eggers uses Toph to voice his own misgivings about his authorial practices. Most of all, he’s sensitive about his use of “gimmicks” to tell his story, which he thinks he would fail to accurately portray without “bells and whistles.” Of course, he is in this moment also using Toph as a “gimmick,” one that enables him to address his overuse of gimmicks in the first place. As such, he makes good on the promise he made in the acknowledgements section to be upfront about his use of self-conscious narration.
Themes
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.”
What’s most interesting about Eggers’s meta-narrative technique is that he doesn’t only use it as a way of superimposing a new layer of thought onto his memoir, he also uses it as a way of advancing story. Indeed, he analyzes his own writing while also setting forth new information, like the fact that his father was in AA. Until this point, Eggers has only hinted that his father liked to drink. Now, though, he makes it clear that his father had an actual drinking problem. In turn, he allows the story to maintain its forward movement even as he takes a moment to examine its finer details. Toph also brings up an important point about how Eggers feels about telling his parents’ stories. Suggesting that Eggers has to fight against a sense of “guilt,” he confirms that his brother is uneasy about his decision to narrate stories about other people.
Themes
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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.
Again, Eggers manages to continue producing new narrative material even as he takes a detour to analyze his writing. Referencing Eggers’s harsh parenting style, Toph sets forth a story about a conversation his brother had with Marny, one in which Eggers was too sensitive. Although Toph’s point is a good one, readers can’t help but understand why Eggers might become defensive in this moment. After all, people are constantly looking at him strangely and judging his caretaking abilities because of his age. As such, it’s unsurprising that he might explode at a friend for deigning to give him advice, even if that friend only intended to help him.
Themes
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.
When Toph says that Eggers has the chance to “right the wrongs of [his] own upbringing,” readers might recall the idea that Eggers and Beth can decide which of their parents’ traditions and customs they’d like to keep alive and which they’d like to cast aside. In a strange way, then, it’s almost as if Eggers has become his own parent, since Toph was raised in the same context as him but is now his responsibility, giving him the chance to take care of a younger version of himself.
Themes
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.
Eggers’s relationship with his class identity is worth noting. Lake Forest, Illinois is a very affluent town, and although Eggers makes it clear that his family was financially “tight-fisted,” there’s no denying the fact that he has never been economically disadvantaged. When Toph points out that he likes to pretend he’s “lower class,” he lampoons him for romanticizing the idea of poverty in order to create a more interesting story. Indeed, the only way Eggers could be conceived of as disadvantaged has to do with the fact that he lost both parents before fully coming of age. This, of course, has nothing to do with being “lower class.”
Themes
