388
PARTISAN REVIEW
language, undisguisedly derogatory and hostile
in
intent, and the effect
is to destroy the authority of adults, which is irreconcilable with these
revelations about their sexual activities. The greatest impression on the
child who is being initiated is made by the relation the information
bears to his own parents, which is often instantly repudiated in some
such words as these: "It may be true that your father and mother and
other people do such things, but it is quite impossible that mine do."
("A Special Type of Choices of Object Made by Men.")
Now we are in a better position to approach the two contrasted
scenes which do so much to make "I Want to Know Why" a com–
pelling story. The scene at the paddocks depicts a fervently desired
communion with an idealized and desexualized father, a father to–
ward whom one need have no feelings of competitiveness and hostility.
Moreover, it recalls just such a situation of innocence-it recalls the
pre-oedipal situation in which the feeling of father and son for the
mother was a bond between them instead of the focus of rivalry, and
father, mother and child were united in love. In this scene Sunstreak
becomes the mother, and the boy and Jerry Tillford are brought to–
gether by their admiration and love for the stallion. (Sunstreak re–
minds the boy, it will be recalled, of "a girl you think about some–
times but never see.")
The scene at the rummy-looking farmhouse undoes the scene
at the paddocks. Jerry's bragging, which is at the expense of Sun–
streak, reveals that he has no real love for the stallion, and thus shows
the boy that there was actually no foundation for the experience he
thought he had had that afternoon. Because the boy identifies with
the stallion, the trainer's boasts are also a blow to his self-esteem.
Finally, the boasts show how unfit the trainer is to be the kind of
parent the boy had desired.
The disclosure of Jerry's sexuality wounds the boy still more
deeply. Even more than his bragging, it disqualifies the trainer for
the kind of relationship the boy had desired-a relationship which
would be washed of all competitiveness and enmity.
It
is the source
of a more encompassing disillusionment.
It
forces on the boy the un–
welcome knowledge that this is a sexual, sinful world, in which he
can nowhere hope to find the kind of communion he has sought or
the perfection he once attributed to the parents and later hoped to
find incarnated in others. The trainer's behavior, his very presence
