Guns symbolize the capacity for violence and, in particular, the narrator’s changing view of Dick Prosser’s violent potential. At first, the gun symbolizes what the narrator and his friends respect about Dick Prosser. Instead of suggesting Dick’s potential for violence, the fact that Dick can shoot with perfect aim signals to the boys his admirable skill—something they want to emulate. The gun even seems to indicate grace and agility: when Dick kindly demonstrates how to throw a football perfectly, it is “as if he were pointing a gun, [rifling] it in a beautiful, whizzing spiral.” The narrator initially views guns as awe-inspiring because he connects them with the qualities that he admires in Dick.
When the narrator and his friends find Dick’s rifle in the basement, though, guns become a symbol for what is potentially dangerous. When the narrator sees it, he describes it as “deadly in its murderous efficiency.” Sitting beside a box of ammunition, the gun is unnerving because its purpose is unclear and perhaps sinister. Before, the narrator used gun imagery as an analogy for Dick’s gracefulness (something that elicited the boys’ admiration and trust), but now the actual gun is a blatant sign of Dick’s possible untrustworthiness. The boys’ view of Dick is shaken because the gun hints that, like the weapon, Dick is capable of causing death. However, still trusting Dick enough to take his word for it, the boys accept that the gun can be something wonderful—worthy of being a Christmas present, as Dick claims.
After Dick’s shooting spree, however, guns become a symbol for extreme violence. In the same way that the gun lay inertly on Dick’s table, only revealing its violent potential, Dick’s violence and the violence of the entire town lay hidden until the shooting spree and its aftermath. When they hear of his crime, the mob runs to the general store, smashes the window, and grabs all the guns. The violence that surfaces is disproportionate: Dick, after enduring racist attitudes in the town, shoots not only white policemen but also Black residents, despite having no obvious motive. Likewise, the mob puts 287 bullets into Dick’s body when one would have sufficed, suggesting that beyond supposed justice, the mob is carried away by racially motivated vengeance. In these instances, the violence has exceeded beyond the bounds of its target.
Ultimately, guns represent the narrator’s changing perspective on Dick and humanity as a whole. Both Dick and humanity harbor potential violence in the same way that a gun does. While a gun isn’t inherently violent—it can be gracefully shot at an inanimate target, and until wielded by a malicious human, it’s harmless just sitting there—it can wreak horrific damage that rips communities apart. Similarly, human beings might appear innocent, but that doesn’t mean they don’t contain a deeply entrenched, destructive potential.
Guns Quotes in The Child by Tiger
He just lifted that little rifle in his powerful black hands as if it were a toy, without seeming to take aim, pointed it toward a strip of tin on which we had crudely marked out some bull’s-eye circles, and he simply peppered the center of the bull’s-eye, putting twelve holes through a space one inch square, so fast we could not even count the shots.
See it! My eyes were glued upon it. Squarely across the bare board table, blue-dull, deadly in its murderous efficiency, lay a modern repeating rifle. Beside it lay a box containing one hundred rounds of ammunition, and behind it, squarely in the center, face downward on the table, was the familiar cover of Dick’s worn old Bible.
He looked at me and whispered, “It’s Dick!” And in a moment, “They say he’s killed four people.” “With— ” I couldn’t finish. Randy nodded dumbly, and we both stared there for a minute, aware now of the murderous significance of the secret we had kept, with a sudden sense of guilt and fear, as if somehow the crime lay on our shoulders.
Dick Prosser appeared in the doorway of the shack, deliberately took aim with his rifle, and shot the fleeing Negro squarely through the back of the head. Harris dropped forward on his face into the snow. He was dead before he hit the ground.
The men on horseback reached him first. They rode up around him and discharged their guns into him. He fell forward in the snow, riddled with bullets. The men dismounted, turned him over on his back, and all the other men came in and riddled him. They took his lifeless body, put a rope around his neck, and hung him to a tree. Then the mob exhausted all their ammunition on the riddled carcass.
Guns Symbol Timeline in The Child by Tiger
