We Are All Cain: Thomas Wolfe’s Transformation of Biblical Myth in “The Lost Boy”

Abstract

With its themes of loss and disconnection, multiple narrators, and vivid sensory descriptions, Thomas Wolfe’s “The Lost Boy” is a classic work of American modernism and a staple of literature survey classes.1 The story is an autobiographical reminiscence of Wolfe’s older brother Grover, called Robert in the text, who died of typhoid during the family’s stay in St. Louis during the 1904 World’s Fair. Much has been written on “The Lost Boy,” with most critics focusing on Wolfe’s use of multiple narrators and treatment of memory. Hayashi Ichiro, for instance, views the story as a collection of “patterns arising as the characters recall the past against the backdrop of their consciousness of time’s objective and linear progression” (78).2 Ruth Winchester Ware explores Wolfe’s search for meaning through remembrance, considering how “we carry memories of the deceased with us into the future and incorporate aspects of the other into our own lives” (60). Paula Gallant Eckard likewise examines the way the story’s three first-person narrators remember Robert, contrasting the mother’s “memorializing” with the sister’s “bridge to Grover” and with the final narrator’s struggle “to reconcile memory and grief, the past and the present, and the sense of loss and dislocation he feels” (15, 16, 17). What critics have not noticed is how in “The Lost Boy” Wolfe emphasizes the difficulty of this struggle by rewriting the myth of Cain and Abel. The text establishes strong parallels between Robert and Cain. Just as Cain is Abel’s elder brother, Robert is older than story’s final narrator who functions as Wolfe’s surrogate. All four narrators describe Robert in ways that match the conventional image of Cain as dark-complexioned and marked by God’s curse. His sister, for example, remarks on his “black eyes” and “olive skin” (2011), and his birthmark, “a berry of warm brown” (2001), is mentioned no less than six times in the story. Further, Robert resembles the biblical Cain, who was “a tiller of the ground” (Genesis 4:2),3 in his interest in agriculture: Robert pesters a fellow traveler on the train to St. Louis with questions about the size and produce of the farms in Indiana (2010). Even Cain’s offering of https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2063707