Previous
Mrs. Burridge
Frank Burridge is Mrs. Burridge’s husband. He is a hard-working and generally kind man, although Mrs. Burridge is regularly annoyed with him and refers to him as “pigheaded.” Frank does a majority of the manual labor around the Burridge house including tending the farm and performing menial tasks such as fixing the cellar stairs. Mrs. Burridge feels that she relies heavily on Frank to survive and does not know what she would do without him. Similarly, Frank relies on Mrs. Burridge to keep him fed and run the home. Mrs. Burridge and Frank know each other well and their marriage has fallen into certain patterns that Mrs. Burridge finds tiring. However, it is difficult to know if Frank feels the same way because the story never reveals his perspective. Largely, Frank leaves his wife alone and does not push her for answers, even when he knows she is lying. Throughout most of the story, Frank moves around in the background as Mrs. Burridge watches him and worries that he has become too weak to protect her. In Mrs. Burridge’s apocalyptic daydream, Frank goes off with Henry Clarke and another farmer to try to find out what is going on. Mrs. Burridge abandons him in the daydream because she thinks he will not come back.
Frank Burridge Quotes in When It Happens
The When It Happens quotes below are all either spoken by Frank Burridge or refer to Frank Burridge. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
When It Happens
Quotes
It used to annoy Mrs. Burridge, especially the crumbs, but now she watches him with a kind of sadness; she once thought their life together would go on forever but she has come to realize this is not the case.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
On paper Frank is making more money than he ever has: yet they seem to have less to spend. They could always sell the farm, she supposes, to people from the city who would use it as a weekend place; they could get what seems like a very high price, several of the farms south of them have gone that way. But Mrs. Burridge does not have much faith in money; also it is a waste of the land, this is her home, she has it arranged the way she wants it.
She comes back up the stairs after the last trip. It’s not as easy as it used to be, her knee still bothers her as it has ever since she fell six years ago, she tripped on the second-last step. She’s asked Frank a million times to fix the stairs but he hasn’t done it, that’s what she means by pig-headed. If she asks him more than twice to do something he calls it nagging, and maybe it is, but who’s going to do it if he won’t? The cold vacant hole at the back of this question is too much for her.
He can’t protect me. She doesn’t think this on purpose, it simply occurs to her, and it isn’t only him, it’s all of them, they’ve lost the power, you can tell by the way they walk. They are all waiting, just as Mrs. Burridge is, for whatever it is to happen. Whether they realize it or not.
It is about this time too that she takes one of the guns, she thinks it will be the shotgun as she will have a better chance of hitting something, and hides it along with the shells, under a piece of roofing behind the barn. She does not tell Frank; he will have the twenty-two. She has already picked out the spot.
He comes out, kisses her goodbye, which is unusual too, and says he’ll be back in a couple of hours. She watches the three of them drive off in Henry Clarke’s truck, towards the smoke, she knows he will not come back. She supposes she ought to feel more emotional about it, but she is well prepared, she has been saying goodbye to him silently for years.
Get the entire When It Happens LitChart as a printable PDF.
Frank Burridge Quotes in When It Happens
The When It Happens quotes below are all either spoken by Frank Burridge or refer to Frank Burridge. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
When It Happens
Quotes
It used to annoy Mrs. Burridge, especially the crumbs, but now she watches him with a kind of sadness; she once thought their life together would go on forever but she has come to realize this is not the case.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
On paper Frank is making more money than he ever has: yet they seem to have less to spend. They could always sell the farm, she supposes, to people from the city who would use it as a weekend place; they could get what seems like a very high price, several of the farms south of them have gone that way. But Mrs. Burridge does not have much faith in money; also it is a waste of the land, this is her home, she has it arranged the way she wants it.
She comes back up the stairs after the last trip. It’s not as easy as it used to be, her knee still bothers her as it has ever since she fell six years ago, she tripped on the second-last step. She’s asked Frank a million times to fix the stairs but he hasn’t done it, that’s what she means by pig-headed. If she asks him more than twice to do something he calls it nagging, and maybe it is, but who’s going to do it if he won’t? The cold vacant hole at the back of this question is too much for her.
He can’t protect me. She doesn’t think this on purpose, it simply occurs to her, and it isn’t only him, it’s all of them, they’ve lost the power, you can tell by the way they walk. They are all waiting, just as Mrs. Burridge is, for whatever it is to happen. Whether they realize it or not.
It is about this time too that she takes one of the guns, she thinks it will be the shotgun as she will have a better chance of hitting something, and hides it along with the shells, under a piece of roofing behind the barn. She does not tell Frank; he will have the twenty-two. She has already picked out the spot.
He comes out, kisses her goodbye, which is unusual too, and says he’ll be back in a couple of hours. She watches the three of them drive off in Henry Clarke’s truck, towards the smoke, she knows he will not come back. She supposes she ought to feel more emotional about it, but she is well prepared, she has been saying goodbye to him silently for years.
