The Shear Symbol Analysis

“The most frightening machine [Tara has] ever seen,” what Gene Westover calls the Shear, is a “three-ton pair of scissors” with blades made of dense iron. The blades are “twelve inches thick and five feet across,” and they cut through a mechanism of strength rather than sharpness. Just one of the many dangerous apparatuses on the scrap yard, the Shear symbolizes Gene’s obsession with domineering over his family and environment, and putting his family’s fate in the hands of God to prove to himself that their way of living is right. When Gene brings the Shear home to the scrap yard, even Shawn sees the Shear as a “death machine”—and yet Gene is determined to teach his children, including the young and slight Tara, to wrangle the machine. The Shear, then, becomes a symbol of Gene’s wildly delusional belief that he can tame any force of nature or any creation of man through will alone. Within five minutes of teaching the children how to feed scrap into the Shear’s jaws, Luke’s arm is “gashed to the bone” and “spurting” blood, but Gene sees the chomping blades—and his children’s ability to work them—as proof that he can exert control over his family, over the dangerous scrap yard, and over common sense itself. As the years go by and the Westovers experience a series of gruesome and life-threatening accidents in the scrap yard, including third-degree burns, brain bleeds, and serious falls from great heights, they only rarely turn to doctors and hospitals for medical attention, believing the medical profession to be a hotbed for “devils.” Gene and his brood return again and again to the dangerous pursuits which daily threaten their well-being, determined that they will recover if it is God’s will that they do.