What's Eating Gilbert Grape

Bonnie speaks about only three subjects: food, cigarettes, and Arnie. She uses the first two to satisfy the pain and sadness that her husband’s death left her with, becoming symbols of self-destruction. She also uses these items to exert a small level of control over her children by manipulating them into providing them for her. Gilbert considers withholding these items from his mother on several occasions, knowing that they are slowly killing her, but he always caves to her demands. At the end of the book, he knows that he contributed to her death with these items that are symbols of guilt for him. Gilbert's eating habits also reflect his own complicated, shame-ridden relationship with food due to his mother's addiction to it. He works at a grocery store but often refuses food, especially when his family members ask him to eat with them. When the entire group eats at Burger Barn to celebrate Arnie's 18th birthday, he only orders water due to his embarrassment when the server mistakenly assumes Bonnie's order is the entire family's dinner.

Lamson Grocery is a small business in Endora that is failing because of the newer, more modern Food Land across town. To Gilbert, who works there, Lamson Grocery is an extension of its owner, someone he sees as hard-working and of strong integrity. Gilbert believes that the people of Endora often lack these qualities. At the same time, Lamson Grocery represents the past, a simpler time before mechanical doors and lobster tanks in supermarkets. Although Mr. Lamson is aware that Food Land is drawing away his customers, he continues to open his doors every morning and proceed with his day as though nothing is changing. Ultimately, Gilbert finds him in Food Land surveying the competition, stunned as he realizes that his store is becoming a relic. Lamson Grocery helps illustrate the novel's theme of change in its tension between modernization and the preservation of traditional small-town life.

Gilbert makes multiple trips to the cemetery throughout the novel. On some occasions, he visits his father’s grave. Sometimes he goes to the grave of his second-grade teacher, Mrs. Brainer. Gilbert carries unresolved feelings regarding his father, especially as he matures and people begin to point out how much he resembles him. Gilbert carries guilt about his father’s death because, on the day of his suicide, he sensed something was wrong and planned to go to him, but Mrs. Brainer forced him to remain at school due to a bathroom accident. Her death is announced early in the novel, and Gilbert becomes focused on her mode of death and her burial plot. After his friend recalls the story about the bathroom accident, Gilbert goes to the cemetery to urinate on his teacher's grave. The cemetery becomes a symbol of Gilbert’s guilt and grief over his father’s death and his resentment of those whom he sees as sharing culpability for it.