The Wallet Symbol Analysis

Eggers’s wallet used to belong to his father, and it clearly represents one of the few things of his father’s that he has been able to incorporate into his own life. As such, he’s desperate to retrieve it when he thinks he has lost it. “The wallet is gone,” he writes. “My father has slipped further down the well. The wallet was the constant reminder; every time I used it, it was always there, in my pocket!” However, this wallet takes on new symbolic complexity when Eggers becomes so obsessed with finding it that he permits himself to make racist assumptions about a group of unwitting teenagers. Threatening to call the police—which he refers to in his head as “My police”—he jumps to the conclusion that these kids have taken his wallet, and this conclusion is largely based on the fact that they aren’t white. When he finally goes home, though, he finds the wallet sitting on his dresser. As such, the wallet becomes a manifestation not only of how much Eggers misses his father, but also of the anger and desperation he has about his own misfortune. Unable to focus on anything except the fact that the wallet belonged to his father, Eggers makes brash and irrational accusations, ultimately emphasizing how powerfully emotions can alter a person’s behavior.