The Home Symbol Analysis

The Home, Bud Caldwell’s name for his orphanage, is the site of many of his worst memories and symbolizes profound isolation and loneliness throughout the novel. It is where he’s forced to live after his mother’s death, and so its name is particularly ironic since it is not a true “home” as much as it is a waiting room or temporary lodging for Bud as he goes between foster homes. While a home often suggests the place where one can go to feel a sense of familiarity, trust, and love, the Home is quite the opposite. For one, Bud is distrustful of the other children in the Home, evidenced by his insistence on counting and recounting the things in his suitcase to make sure everything is accounted for, especially with “more and more kids coming into the Home every day,” and his insistence on sleeping with a jackknife. It is also the place in which Bud’s isolation from a family and people that care for him is the starkest. To belong to the Home means that there is no true home nor family for him to return to.

Bud ultimately rejects the kind of lonely existence that the Home symbolizes. He goes on the run, choosing to take his chances finding a makeshift family for himself instead of allowing himself to accept the inadequate (and sometimes outright abusive) version of a home and a community that the Home gives him. In doing so, Bud realizes that he has the power to redefine what a true home, one built around community, familiarity, should be.