A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

by

Dave Eggers

Eggers’s Father (John Eggers) Character Analysis

Eggers, Beth, Toph, and Bill’s father. Eggers only provides fragmentary and rather random bits of information about his father, which perhaps indicates how close he was to the man. Still, he makes it clear that Bill Eggers, a “commodities-oriented lawyer” practicing in Chicago, is a private man with unique, almost eccentric ideas. For instance, he decides to put a fish tank in a small recess in the living room wall, and though he doesn’t measure the dimensions of the space before acting on this decision, the tank fits perfectly and then goes untouched for quite some time. The fish inevitably die, but Eggers’s father keeps the tank in the living room, glowing strangely from its perch. At some point after Eggers’s mother is diagnosed with stomach cancer, John sits his children down and bluntly encourages them to expect her death. What they don’t expect, though, is that he will die five weeks before her. Indeed, Eggers’s father is diagnosed with lung cancer after his wife learns of her stomach cancer, but his illness is much more aggressive, killing him before anyone has fully realized that he’s going to die. In his memoir, Eggers reveals (though not at first) that his father was an alcoholic and that he was often physically abusive to him and his siblings. By withholding this information at the beginning of the book, he enables readers to mourn his father’s loss before complicating this feeling with unflattering notions about the way John Eggers treated his family.

Eggers’s Father (John Eggers) Quotes in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

The A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius quotes below are all either spoken by Eggers’s Father (John Eggers) or refer to Eggers’s Father (John Eggers). For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Self-Consciousness and Meta-Narration Theme Icon
).
Acknowledgements Quotes

[…] an incomparable loss begets both constant struggle and heart-hardening, but also some unimpeachable rewards, starting with absolute freedom, interpretable and of use in a number of ways. And though it seems inconceivable to lose both parents in the space of 32 days […] and to lose them to completely different diseases (cancer, sure, but different enough, in terms of location, duration, and provenance), that loss is accompanied by an undeniable but then of course guilt-inducing sense of mobility, of infinite possibility, having suddenly found oneself in a world with neither floor nor ceiling.

Related Characters: Dave Eggers (speaker), Eggers’s Mother (Heidi Eggers), Eggers’s Father (John Eggers)
Page Number: xviii
Explanation and Analysis:

This part concerns the unshakable feeling one gets, one thinks, after the unthinkable and unexplainable happens—the feeling that, if this person can die, and that person can die, and this can happen and that can happen…well, then, what exactly is preventing everything from happening to this person, he around whom everything else happened? If people are dying, why won’t he? If people are shooting people from cars, if people are tossing rocks down from overpasses, surely he will be the next victim. If people are contracting AIDS, odds are he will, too.

Related Characters: Dave Eggers (speaker), Eggers’s Mother (Heidi Eggers), Eggers’s Father (John Eggers)
Page Number: xxiii
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

You know, to be honest, though, what I see is less a problem with form, all that garbage, and more a problem of conscience. You’re completely paralyzed with guilt about relating all this in the first place, especially the stuff earlier on. You feel somehow obligated to do it, but you also know that Mom and Dad would hate it, would crucify you […]. But then again, I should say, and Bill and Beth would say—well, probably not Bill, but definitely Beth—that your guilt, and their disapproval, is a very middlebrow, middle-class, midwestern sort of disapproval. It’s superstition as much as anything—like the primitives who fear the camera will take their soul. You struggle with a guilt both Catholic and unique to the home in which you were raised. Everything there was a secret—for instance, your father being in AA was not to be spoken of, ever, while he was in and after he stopped attending. You never told even your closest friends about anything that happened inside that house. And now you alternately rebel against and embrace that kind of suppression.

Related Characters: Toph Eggers (speaker), Dave Eggers, Eggers’s Mother (Heidi Eggers), Eggers’s Father (John Eggers), Beth Eggers, Bill Eggers
Page Number: 115
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

I had loved how vague it was before. Where are they? Well, that’s a good question. Where were they buried? Another interesting question. That was the beauty of my father’s way. We knew that he had been diagnosed, but not how sick he was. We knew that he was in the hospital, but then not how close he was. It had always felt strangely appropriate, and his departure was made complete, as was hers, by the fact that the ashes never found us in California, that we had moved, and moved again, and again, dodging, weaving.

Related Characters: Dave Eggers (speaker), Eggers’s Mother (Heidi Eggers), Eggers’s Father (John Eggers), Beth Eggers
Related Symbols: Heidi and John Eggers’s Ashes
Page Number: 374
Explanation and Analysis:
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Eggers’s Father (John Eggers) Quotes in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

The A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius quotes below are all either spoken by Eggers’s Father (John Eggers) or refer to Eggers’s Father (John Eggers). For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Self-Consciousness and Meta-Narration Theme Icon
).
Acknowledgements Quotes

[…] an incomparable loss begets both constant struggle and heart-hardening, but also some unimpeachable rewards, starting with absolute freedom, interpretable and of use in a number of ways. And though it seems inconceivable to lose both parents in the space of 32 days […] and to lose them to completely different diseases (cancer, sure, but different enough, in terms of location, duration, and provenance), that loss is accompanied by an undeniable but then of course guilt-inducing sense of mobility, of infinite possibility, having suddenly found oneself in a world with neither floor nor ceiling.

Related Characters: Dave Eggers (speaker), Eggers’s Mother (Heidi Eggers), Eggers’s Father (John Eggers)
Page Number: xviii
Explanation and Analysis:

This part concerns the unshakable feeling one gets, one thinks, after the unthinkable and unexplainable happens—the feeling that, if this person can die, and that person can die, and this can happen and that can happen…well, then, what exactly is preventing everything from happening to this person, he around whom everything else happened? If people are dying, why won’t he? If people are shooting people from cars, if people are tossing rocks down from overpasses, surely he will be the next victim. If people are contracting AIDS, odds are he will, too.

Related Characters: Dave Eggers (speaker), Eggers’s Mother (Heidi Eggers), Eggers’s Father (John Eggers)
Page Number: xxiii
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

You know, to be honest, though, what I see is less a problem with form, all that garbage, and more a problem of conscience. You’re completely paralyzed with guilt about relating all this in the first place, especially the stuff earlier on. You feel somehow obligated to do it, but you also know that Mom and Dad would hate it, would crucify you […]. But then again, I should say, and Bill and Beth would say—well, probably not Bill, but definitely Beth—that your guilt, and their disapproval, is a very middlebrow, middle-class, midwestern sort of disapproval. It’s superstition as much as anything—like the primitives who fear the camera will take their soul. You struggle with a guilt both Catholic and unique to the home in which you were raised. Everything there was a secret—for instance, your father being in AA was not to be spoken of, ever, while he was in and after he stopped attending. You never told even your closest friends about anything that happened inside that house. And now you alternately rebel against and embrace that kind of suppression.

Related Characters: Toph Eggers (speaker), Dave Eggers, Eggers’s Mother (Heidi Eggers), Eggers’s Father (John Eggers), Beth Eggers, Bill Eggers
Page Number: 115
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

I had loved how vague it was before. Where are they? Well, that’s a good question. Where were they buried? Another interesting question. That was the beauty of my father’s way. We knew that he had been diagnosed, but not how sick he was. We knew that he was in the hospital, but then not how close he was. It had always felt strangely appropriate, and his departure was made complete, as was hers, by the fact that the ashes never found us in California, that we had moved, and moved again, and again, dodging, weaving.

Related Characters: Dave Eggers (speaker), Eggers’s Mother (Heidi Eggers), Eggers’s Father (John Eggers), Beth Eggers
Related Symbols: Heidi and John Eggers’s Ashes
Page Number: 374
Explanation and Analysis: