What’s Going On in “Revenge”

In an earlier post, “Egocentrism, Part 2,” we looked at how a preschooler’s egocentrism might affect how he reacts to a newborn sibling. The story, “Revenge,” essentially explores this, giving us a first-person view of the child’s experience and irrational fears.

The narrator of “Revenge” clearly resents his baby brother, and in an impulsive moment, acts out his anger and murderous feelings in nearly pushing his brother into the street. Like most parents, his fathers give him a stern talking to, telling him about the intellectual dangers of traffic, but it seems they don’t address or even suspect that the boy’s emotions caused his recklessness.

(A quick note here: even if the boy hadn’t meant to push his brother into the busy street, his fathers focused only on safety and missed an opportunity to address the boy’s feelings. If the narrator had only made an innocent mistake, he would likely have felt terrible guilt over his carelessness, and the fathers might have helped him recognize that it’s normal enough for four-year-olds to be careless. Ultimately, they’re telling him he’s not a bad kid, thus preventing an unhealthy narrative from forming. If we’re even looking at who is at fault here, if the boy is simply careless, then the responsibility is on the two dads for overestimating their son and placing him in charge of their newborn’s safety.)

Whether the boy recognizes his own motives, he certainly imagines that his angry fathers see the murderous “monster” in him. In a typically egocentric view, he then imagines that his fathers will have murderous, punishing feelings towards him. This terrifies the boy, and he begins to develop new narratives about himself and his fathers.

He likely sees himself as a bad kid, a monster. He tries to hide these feelings from everyone by behaving and following the rules. But he remains terrified of his parents and what he imagines could be retribution for any anger or resentment he feels for his brother.

From the story, we don’t know what then happens between the narrator and his little brother, but we do know that he has a life-long nightmare that parallels the moment when he nearly pushed his brother into traffic. In the dream, he’s “herding” his brother off the end of a dock, but rather than send his brother into the water, he ends up slipping and sliding into the pond where he is held under by “enormous, beautiful hands.”

What this means is not that obvious. After all, when interpreting dreams, we can’t do it by rote, interpreting them through symbols like many people suggest. Instead, we need to understand the details and the associated emotions in the dream as an expression of the dreamer’s conflicting feelings.

In this case, we might suspect that the “enormous” hands are those of an adult (as experienced by a child), but why he also sees the hands as “beautiful” is open to interpretation. Similarly, what is the emotional significance of being “held under” the water? Whether this equates to being punished or controlled or rejected or something else is not clear.

Still, the fact that the dream is current—as well as his present-day dread of spying a body of water through some trees—indicates that the adult narrator has never come to terms with the narratives that formed in his early childhood.