Alvin’s Prosthesis Symbol Analysis

Philip’s cousin Alvin’s prosthesis symbolizes a lack of support in times of crisis. Early on in the novel, Alvin is angered by the isolationist policies of the new American president Charles Lindbergh—and he’s exasperated by the idea of pursuing a conventional education or a conventional job in a time of such huge turbulence. Rather than sit idly by while anti-Semitism grips America, Alvin runs off to Canada to conscript in the Canadian Army and fight with the British against Hitler in the European theater of World War II. Just months later, the Roths receive word that Alvin, their ward, has been injured in battle and will be coming home—he has lost a leg. The Alvin who returns is different from the fiery Alvin who left for Canada—muted, embarrassed, and emaciated, Alvin is learning how to live with his new disability slowly but surely. Alvin has been fitted with a prosthesis—but while the prosthetic leg given to him allows him to be mobile, it also creates a lot of problems when issues with its fit leave Alvin’s stump raw, bleeding, and covered in new wounds. The continual cycles of relief and pain Alvin suffers as the result of his imperfect prosthesis come to serve as a symbol of the failures of the support systems people count on in times of crisis.

As the political situation in America worsens, the Roths struggle to protect and support one another, as well as their friends and neighbors—and often, they fail to do so. Living in terrifying, unprecedented times makes support and solidarity difficult to provide or, for that matter, to accept. And as the novel unfolds, Alvin’s continual need to abstain from his prosthesis while he heals his wounds before carefully, slowly returning to his reliance on it is an external representation of the delicate balance of familial, societal, and political systems of support and solidarity. At the end of the novel, when Philip’s family takes in the orphaned Seldon Wishnow, Philip sees his broken school friend as a stump—and Philip describes himself as “the prosthesis” which, however ineffectively or imperfectly, serves to prop Seldon up for several years throughout his turbulent childhood. The relationship between stump and prosthesis imprints itself upon Philip, who helps take care of Alvin when he returns from war. It eventually comes to inform the ways in which Philip sees his own responsibility to giving support where he can—even when he feels overwhelmed, overburdened, and imperfect.