A Slow Fire Burning

Laura and Daniel are disappointments to their parents and experience rejection and betrayal as a result. Due to this rejection, both Laura and Daniel become warped and antisocial. The arc of the two characters shows that while the effects of parental betrayal result in self-loathing in children, the children, once adults, can choose how to live their lives. Daniel becomes consumed by anger and self-loathing while Laura is able to achieve a trusting and nurturing relationship with her chosen family. Creating a positive outcome is not easy, but it is possible with proper emotional support.

At first, both Daniel and Laura embrace their feelings of rejection as a survival mechanism. Daniel grows up with a mother who is very unhappy and finds it hard to connect with her son; From the beginning, Angela regretted having children and saw Daniel as a problem. Daniel’s strained relationship with his mother causes him to become consumed with self-loathing. To cope, Daniel embraces the role of the misfit: Carla observes that “instead of making himself the hero of his own story, [Daniel] had made himself the villain” (241).

In contrast, Laura begins life with a relatively happy childhood but begins to suffer as a result of her mother’s unhappiness. Janine becomes embittered with her domestic life in a small town and has an affair. When her lover, Richard, accidentally hits Laura with his car, Janine focuses on how to help him rather than her own child. Janine describes the accident as “something terrible [that] happened to Richard” (160) and lies to cover up his involvement. This experience makes it hard for Laura to trust other people since her mother rejected her during her most vulnerable moment, even lying to her afterwards to manipulate Laura’s memory of the event. Laura’s angry outbursts are partially explained by the brain injury she suffers in the accident and partially by the rage she continues to feel at her mother’s betrayal.

The absent fathers feed into this cycle of betrayal as well. Daniel’s father was never present (Angela was not married), and Daniel felt his father’s absence was a form of rejection. Laura’s father remarried and prioritizes Diedre’s needs over Laura’s, leading to his and Laura’s estrangement.

Both Daniel and Laura struggle with anger and resentment towards their parents. However, while Laura can be suspicious and belligerent, she remains capable of empathy. When she first meets Irene, Laura shows great tenderness to the elderly woman. Irene and Laura develop an unlikely but deep friendship in which both respect and nurture each other. Laura takes Irene seriously while Irene takes on a maternal role that finally allows Laura to feel safe. Daniel, on the other hand, becomes preoccupied with hurting people, especially women, but because Daniel died leaving only his sketchbook, the extent of his behavior cannot be determined. His sketch of Carla naked was subject to interpretation until it was revealed that he sketched her without her knowledge and did not sleep with her. His sketches of the events surrounding Ben’s death are also subject to interpretation: Do they betray his guilty conscience, or, like his sketch of Carla, do they depict a fantasy of what he wished had happened? Daniel is a tragic character because no one knows how he would have developed emotionally if he had lived, whether he would have escalated his cruel behavior or whether he would have found a nurturing, redemptive relationship as did Laura.