Revolutionary Road: Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

After the play, Frank makes his way towards April’s dressing room, wondering what he should say to his wife. He is also twenty-nine, neatly dressed, and with an expressive face. All day long at his boring job in New York City, Frank had pictured himself soothing his wife’s nerves and congratulating her on her success, and he is unprepared to deal with what happened. The performance was like watching the girl he fell in love with turn into the unhappy, tense, reproachful woman she has become.

Backstage the Laurel Players are trying to laugh off their failure. Milly Campbell calls to Frank that she and Shep will see him and April later for a drink, and Frank agrees. He goes into April’s dressing room and bends to kiss her, planning to say that she was wonderful, but she recoils, and he says, “I guess it wasn’t exactly a triumph” instead. Stiffly, she agrees, then asks him to tell Milly and Shep that they can’t go for a drink because they need to get home to their babysitter. Frank says he already told the Campbells they would go. April says she is not going and will go home without him. Apologizing, Frank goes back out and tells the Campbells the lie about the babysitter. Milly asks if April is very upset about the performance, but he says she is fine. Milly and Shep can tell he is lying, and they are hurt.

Frank and April leave the backstage and walk silently through the high school towards the parking lot. Frank remembers his own high school experience, especially a time when he planned to run away and ride freight trains across the country. He had planned to go alone, but then impulsively asked a boy to come with him. The boy had belittled his plan and said he was a jerk. Frank begins to also think about the suffering in April’s childhood, although he usually finds it difficult to sympathize with her because she talks about her childhood unsentimentally. He remembers a story she told him about a time when she suddenly got her period in school and had to run to the bathroom with a red stain on her white skirt, dripping blood on the floor.

April and Frank get into their car, and April sits far from him. Frank begins to give his opinion of the play, but April asks if they can drive in silence, and he agrees. To put the play’s failure in perspective, Frank returns in his mind to his early twenties, when he was out of the army and studying at Columbia College, where everyone thought he would have a brilliant career doing something creative. He shared an apartment on Bethune Street with two other men who often brought women there. As college ended, Frank felt at a loss for what he would do, and it bothered him that he had never dated a “first-rate girl.” Then he had met April at a party. After a week they slept together, and she said he was the most interesting person she had ever met.

Frank begins to talk again, saying that it’s bad enough that they must live among boring suburbanites; they don’t also need to get hurt by them. April asks him to stop talking again. Frank pulls the car off the highway and tries to embrace her, but she asks to be left alone. Frank gets angry at April, calling her melodramatic, and she gets out of the car and runs to the roadside. He is scared for a moment that she means to kill herself and demands that she get back in the car. They begin to fight, insulting one another. April recalls a time when Frank hit her, and says that he isn’t a man. Frank punches the roof of the car hard. They begin to drive home.

Frank and April drive down Revolutionary Road, the same road they traveled two years earlier with Helen Givings, when she showed them their house. Helen had been impressed by them and had shown them a home she thought was more tasteful than the other, newer developments like the Revolutionary Hill Estates. The house had given Frank and April a sense that they might sort out their problems if only they lived in a clean house like this. They planned to arrange the furniture to make the cookie-cutter house look stylish. Arriving home now, the Wheelers see that the house did not live up to its promise: it doesn’t look like a home.

After driving the babysitter home, Frank returns to the house and enters the bedroom. He sits on his and April’s bed and tells her he is sorry. He reflects that she cannot run away now, and that although it will take time, they will get through this fight like they have gotten through others. Then he realizes the bed is empty. He runs through the house until he finds April on the living room sofa. She asks him to go away. Frank apologizes to her, but she only asks him to leave her alone.