53 pages • 1 hour read
Chris WhitakerWe Begin at the End
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Duchess Ray Radley
It is difficult sometimes to remember that Duchess Radley is, for most of the book, only 13 years old. She is like an adult in many ways. It is not just her swearing or that she smokes without apology and takes swigs of Jim Beam. She stays distant from others. Her attitude of aggressive confrontation, her willingness to take on the world, and the joy she takes in ridiculing others and pointing out their faults with brutal honesty seem out of place for a child.
Beneath that hard exterior, however, is a complex psychology. Duchess hungers for the validation of others. Her family is in fragments. School friends mock her for her mother’s unconventional lifestyle. She is lonely. Her mother—an alcoholic in perpetual rehab working long hours as an exotic dancer—leaves the house largely to Duchess. As a result, she is fiercely protective of both her mother and her little brother. She fights for them, literally. She sets fire to his strip club when she finds out that Darke punched her mother. When bigger kids pick on Robin on the playground, Duchess risks expulsion to protect him. That aggression is part of the persona she has created. She is, she tells anyone who will listen, an outlaw.
But her interaction with her grandfather reveals her need for a family. As she learns how her grandfather tried to see her over the years—she figured he had abandoned them—Duchess comes to see the importance of family. Her hilarious relationship with the nerdy Thomas moves toward the moment when Duchess sets aside her snarky putdowns and enjoys a dance with him at the winter formal. Her defining moment, however, comes when she refuses to upend her little brother’s happiness in his adoptive home. In that selfless act, Duchess demonstrates how much she has learned: She loves someone enough to live without them.
Vincent King
Vincent King spends his life wracked by guilt for an accident. The hit-and-run incident (although that is a misnomer—Vincent did not even know he had grazed the girl) begins Vincent’s life of calculated remoteness. In jail, he maintains distance from other prisoners. He lives a monastic life and maintains a saintly aura of calmness. His favorite hymn, “Abide with Me,” assures him that if God walks beside him, the earth, in all its glories and terrors, will pass away. In jail, he meditates in his cell. He has no radio, seldom glances at the communal television, and plays no games with other inmates. He meditates, yes, but he also languishes in guilt and self-loathing, suggested by his scarred arms and legs, where he has nicked himself with a knife. Sissy’s death haunts him even 30 years later—he spends much time at her gravesite.
In a novel that celebrates selfless acts, Vincent, even though he kills two people and for most of the novel seems the most likely killer of Star, emerges against the town gossip. Everything he does in the novel, he does for others. He fixes up his rundown home as a gift for Duchess and Robin, children who do not even know he is their father. Facing a possible death sentence for killing Star, Vincent insists on hiring Martha, an old high school friend who specializes in family law, not criminal law, to be his lawyer. He knows that in doing so, Walk and Martha will rekindle their lost love. Knowing Robin shot Star, he confesses to the murder to help his son avoid the nightmare of an arrest. And in the closing scene, Vincent, praying at Sissy’s grave, throws himself off the cliff, knowing that Duchess, completely misreading everything, would be throwing away her life to settle a score with him that does not even exist: “I won’t let you carry me with you” (351). In this, Vincent King (as his name suggests, Vincent means to conquer, and King suggests his strength) emerges as the novel’s tragic hero.
Sheriff “Walk” Walker
Walk is the novel’s most complicated figure. As the sheriff in Cape Haven, he presumes moral authority and righteous behavior. With his square jaw and his taciturn stoicism, he seems to embody the Hollywood cliché: the lawman with unquestionable integrity, the hero in the white hat who pursues truth in a dark world of greed, lust, and violence. He protects Duchess and Robin and makes round trips to Montana to ensure their safety. Add to that his struggle against the onset of Parkinson’s disease, and Walk would appear to be a paragon of virtue, the essential principle of law and order. He plays sheriff to Duchess’s outlaw.
However, as Walk pursues what he is certain are Vincent’s innocence and Darke’s guilt, he recklessly tramples on the law he is sworn to uphold. He breaks into houses, lies to witnesses, threatens people who might know something, shades the truth when his secretary confronts him, reads Darke all wrong, and, most egregiously, lies under oath to help create sufficient doubt about a confessed killer to assure his friend’s acquittal.
It is not that Walk is exposed as some rogue cop. In keeping with the novel’s sense of how right and wrong are not opposites at all, everything Walk does, every violation of the law, every error in judgment, he does to help others. He is hard not to admire. He brings a sense of righteousness to a world he sees as hopelessly corrupt, or as he describes it, a “world spinning the wrong way” (83). His entire life devoted to law and order is his reaction to when Martha, his first and only love, aborted the child they conceived in high school. In short, he is a paradox: He hungers for truth in a world shaded by secrets and is prepared to lie to get to the truth.
Dickie Darke
Perhaps the most confounding moment in the novel is when Sheriff Walk, hot on the trail of Darke’s labyrinthine financial empire, heads to a care facility miles from Cape Haven. He has ferreted out that Darke sends money monthly to the facility. He suspects it is part of some dark/Darke money laundering scheme to finance illegal operations. He finds that Darke sends money to the care facility every month to keep alive a daughter who has been brain dead for nearly 10 years.
It is a desperate gesture of love from an emotionally shattered man. Dickie Darke—as his name suggests—makes a handy villain. He is a hulking figure, intimidating, shadowy, and emotionally distant. He is notorious for legal maneuverings to secure the houses along the cliff overlooking the ocean. He relentlessly pursues Duchess to get the videotape of her torching his strip club because, without that tape, he cannot continue to kick families out of their homes as he selfishly pursues his ambitious real estate dream. And worst of all, he shoots Hal, Duchess’ benign and loving grandfather.
Because Darke is not privileged as one of the novel’s narrative points of view, he is entirely a perceived character. What neither Walk nor Duchess realizes is the humanity of Darke. Yes, he disciplines the girls at his strip club, and things often get out of hand, but, as a former stripper tells Walk, Darke took care of his girls with the stern attitude of a father. Yes, he has conceived of a development project that destroys people’s homes, but it is certain to help the town out of its economic doldrums. The houses he buys are doomed to collapse from the beach’s steady erosion, and he gives them a fair price. He needs the videotape to secure his redevelopment plan. In the end, when Walk confronts him, he begs Walk to shoot him. A police shooting would preserve his insurance money for his daughter’s care. And as he tries to explain to Walk, the confrontation with Hal turned violent only because Hal shot first and did not give him a chance to explain why he was there.
It is not that Darke is some misunderstood hero. He is not. He has a hair-trigger temper. He is a control freak, and he uses people. So he is, in the end, exactly what his archnemesis Sheriff Walk is: an imperfect and fallible human.
