At this point, the Lisbon sisters’ suicides take on a much greater significance, as people in the community begin to associate the tragedy with much broader issues. More specifically, the townspeople come to see the suicides as a symbolic manifestation of the sense of decline besieging American life—or, to put it more accurately, the sense of decline that white, upper-middle-class Americans living in protected suburban neighborhoods are beginning to detect. The fact that such a strange and inexplicable tragedy can take place in a wealthy suburb undermines the idea that living the quintessential American dream of prosperity will protect people from hardship. Therefore, the Lisbon suicides pose an existential threat to the very fabric of suburban life, which is why so many of the adults in the boys’ neighborhood associate the tragedy with the decline of simpler times—times in which it was possible for them to believe in the mythical prosperity of American suburbia.