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.
Themes
The Dynamics of Grief
At the novel’s emotional core is the hit-and-run death of little Sissy Radley over 30 years in the past. The struggle to handle that death is common to all of the novel’s principal characters. It is an accident—no one really is to blame, yet everyone feels guilty. However, it haunts Vincent King, who was driving. It shapes his emotional life of self-loathing and lacerating introspection. He yearns to be punished even beyond a prison sentence. Star never entirely recovers from her sister’s death—she blames herself because she and her friends stayed out too long that night and caused her little sister to go looking for her on the dark streets.
Like Vincent, Star spends most of her adult life loathing herself, disappearing in a fog of alcohol and prescription medication, debasing herself in the strip club and a long series of meaningless one-night stands, and ultimately submitting to Darke’s violent outbursts. For his part, as a law enforcement officer, Walk struggles to understand where justice was served in the hit-and-run. He recognizes Vincent’s authentic soul-searching and remorse and the nature of the accident itself, and he determines to right the wrong of Vincent’s long incarceration by lying under oath.
The murder of Star triggers a new generation of characters struggling to handle loss. Principally the present time in the narrative focuses on Duchess, the self-proclaimed outlaw and hard-core Equalizer. If Vincent ascends into self-awareness, Star spirals into self-loathing; Walk grapples with righting ancient wrongs, while Duchess introduces self-righteous and self-justifying rage as a response to loss. Her long journey back to Cape Haven is propelled by her simmering anger and determination to avenge her mother’s death. That she is all wrong about Vincent, in the end, makes her strategy of grief adjustment the least successful in the novel. That she finds her way to awareness and self-forgiveness makes her the most heroic in the end.
The Importance of Others
Duchess, all of 13 years old, sounds the credo that appears to drive the principal characters. She is an outlaw. She needs nobody; she answers to nobody; she disdains the advice or help of others. This aggressively isolationist code seems to define all the characters. During 30 years of imprisonment, Vincent imposes solitary confinement on himself. Given his imposing physical presence and his (largely unearned) reputation for underworld brutalities, Darke keeps away from the town. He is no one’s friend. Walk maintains his emotional moat, suggested by his sleepless nights, long walks alone, and the secret he keeps about his Parkinson’s. Traumatized by the abortion her father made her do, Martha has spent her adult life devoted to her work, substituting a family for her practice in family law. Milton, the bachelor butcher, watches Star from a distance, recording her life in photos. Star spirals into alcohol abuse and promiscuity. Hal embodies the loner, by himself in the spacious emptiness of Montana.
One after another, the residents of Cape Haven settle into loneliness and isolation, a kind of collective solitary confinement. The novel, however, reveals critical moments when characters break through their self-imposed isolation and feel the comforting presence of another. That moment sustains the novel’s thematic argument. At the cemetery, Vincent finally talks to Duchess, who does not know he is her father. Martha and Walk hesitatingly rekindle their love over meals of Martha’s hot spicy food.
Knowing he is to die, Darke begs Walk to shoot him to ensure payments to the care facility for his brain-dead daughter will continue. Hal has tried for years to bond with his grandchildren, and their evolving relationship provides Hal the happiness he only dreamed of. In her new yellow dress at the winter formal, Duchess leads Thomas to the dance floor and finds a new sense of calm in their halting moves. And later, in tears, Duchess, the hard-core outlaw, watches through the window, her little brother happy now with his adoptive family. She knows that she will not ruin that for him. It is a self-sacrificing gesture that measures how Duchess has learned the value of others.
Ironically, a novel teeming with the lonely and the alienated affirms the consolation of others. As Walk says, “There’s people in our lives that we’d do anything for” (300).
The Contradictory Nature of the World
Variations of one idea echo through the novel: You never really understand anybody or anything completely. The novel is technically a murder mystery—who shot Star Radley in her kitchen while her son was sleeping down the hall? Conventionally, such novels slowly offer clues and, in the end, offer a satisfying closure. Such novels reassure us that the world, despite its apparent murkiness, will inevitably yield clarity and reveal tidy, neat solutions.
The novel keeps upending those assumptions. Vincent, the convicted killer of two people and the confessed murderer of another, reveals himself to be tender-hearted, compassionate, and virtuous. For all her swagger, her protestations of self-reliance, and her evident loathing of anyone who tries to get close, Duchess is at heart a grieving child, lost in a dark and threatening world. The town’s most notorious gangster—the greedy real estate developer who, like some cartoon villain, delights in evicting families from homes their families have lived in for centuries—is a man with a vision who wants to preserve the town so that it can move forward.
All the money he appears to be manipulating like some grand Ponzi scheme is largely to ensure he can meet the exorbitant payments for his brain-dead daughter. Walk, for all his Gary Cooper-quiet-lawman persona, in the end, manufactures evidence and commits perjury. Robin, the feisty kid with the bedwetting problem, is a killer. Thomas, the nerdy kid with the withered arm, takes on an entire gang of bullies threatening his girl. Hal, the estranged grandfather, has spent his life trying to bond with his family. However, Hal cannot be canonized because he paid a man to stage a prison fight that puts 20 years on the prison sentence of the innocent Vincent.
No one is entirely one thing or the other. There are no heroes; there are no villains. As a subplot about Duchess and Hal’s ongoing debate over Christianity suggests, the world of angels and demons is simply irrelevant to the real-time world. The more Walk (and Martha) tunnel into the events around Star Radley’s shooting, the more they search for the truth, the more it eludes them. The more Walk sees, the less he understands. From Duchess on the warpath from Montana to Cape Haven or Walk pursuing Darke’s finances, the more certain characters are, the more wrong they are. Bad people reveal nobility in their character. Good people are good because of some fatal character flaw. As Duchess concludes on her long journey back to Cape Haven, determined to kill the wrong man, “you always see things wrong at night” (312).
The Corrosive Effects of Secrets
When Walk finds the battered suitcase full of photos that Milton, the town butcher, took of Star Radley, the woman he loved in secret for more than 20 years, he observes, “Nothing hurts as much as what we don’t say” (288). In a novel that affirms the importance of others and elevates sympathy, it is not surprising that the novel also reveals the corrosive effect of secrets. In building walls and maintaining emotional distance from others, characters spiral into paranoia, depression, self-medication, and self-loathing. The novel argues that it is not what we do that matters but rather our decision to share with others, let them in and offer comfort and reassurance.
When, for instance, Star never tells Robin or Duchess who their father is, letting them imagine they are products of any one of several careless relationships she is rumored to have had since her sister’s death. And when Star finds out about her father’s manipulations that keep Vincent, the man she loved, in jail for an additional 20 years, she not only shuts him out of her life but also keeps him from her children without telling them why. That loss of her extended family creates Duchess’ poor self-esteem and her belligerent, confrontational attitude.
In turn, Duchess and Robin, in flight to Montana fearing Darke’s wrath, live daily in paranoia and fear. Walk’s Parkinson’s diagnosis builds a wall around him. He cannot confide in anyone he works with because the diagnosis will cost him his career. In his financial transactions, Darke creates the appearance of some grand illegal empire because he never tells anyone about his daughter or concerns about the long-term financial stability of a town he loves. Vincent willingly confesses to a murder he did not commit to protect a child who does not even know Vincent is his father.
It is not that these characters lie. They believe sharing their flaws, their emotional wreckage, can only lead to further emotional devastation. They keep secrets to protect those they love. They elect not to share in a world where the sole possibility for redemption comes from sharing. Each character, in turn, comes to the realization that secrets are corrosive. Vincent at the cemetery, Walk in the courthouse with Martha after his testimony, Darke right before his death—each character comes to feel the relief of unburdening themselves of secrets.
