Having your
tenth birthday party ruined because of a guest’s death is, quite literally, a
buzzkill. Colin Henne-Falcon was misfortunate enough to experience this, as
Francis Morton was invited. In “The End of the Party,” Greene presents the
reader with a character who is nearly impossible to sympathize with because of
his abject weakness. He fails on numerous occasions to communicate his fears to
others, cannot to socialize with his peers, and relies completely upon his twin
brother Peter for comfort and protection. Greene also relates the common
childhood fear of the dark to the adult fear of death. In doing so, he
implicitly criticizes the hypocrisy of adults and provides the reader with his
view of death.
Greene uses
countless adjectives to describe Francis’ delicate personality. He is
humiliated (30), desperate (31), panicked (31), overwhelmed (31), afraid (32),
despairing (32), removed (32), troubled (33), fearful (33), terrified (34),
cowardly (34), and frightened (34). Francis lacks the courage to confess his
fears to Ms. Henne-Falcon (which is definitely a reference to the bird
attacking/looming over Francis), his nurse, or even his parents, and looks to
his brother as a means of escaping negative situations. He also does not
socialize well with other children; he allows Joyce and Mabel Warren to torment
him and generally does not stand up for himself. These laundry list of faults
create a character who ultimately too feeble to live in the world. Greene
labels Francis’ time in utero as a “struggle in pain and darkness” (29).
Francis’ lack of development forces the question: did he ever escape that pain
and darkness?
 |
| Francis, all the time. |
However, Greene
does not tell the tale of a pathetic child’s ignominious death to condemn
childhood fears as insignificant and irrational. Rather, children’s fear of the
dark mirrors adults’ fear of death. Greene conveys to us Francis’ understanding
of this, “[Francis] knew how they taught also that there was nothing to fear in
death, and how fearfully they avoided the idea of it” (32). In essence, adults
fear death in the same way children regard the dark, and are thus hypocritical
in their denunciations. At the conclusion, Peter’s sixth-sense connection to
Francis reveals that Francis’ fear continues after his death. This confuses
Peter, and he wonders, “why the pulse of his brother’s fear went on and on,
when Francis was now where he had always been told there was no more terror and
no more darkness?” (36). This serves as an indicator that death is dark and
terrifying – not a particularly uplifting message. And certainly no way to end
a birthday party.
Questions:
1) Considering who “killed” Francis, is his death ironic?
2) Why is Francis unable to overcome his fear of the
dark/assert himself?
1 comment:
I believe that Francis’s death is ironic in every regard, not only because of who killed him, but also where and when it happened. This story from the beginning gives a sense of impending doom, Francis’s extreme fearfulness keys into this. Yet every situation seems to be straight out of a children’s dream, and there is never a scene of violence in the story. Cake, games, and parties are not usually associated with paralyzing fear and anxiety, but for Francis this is just the case. We see this in the way he describes the party. His fear of the party causes him to have “a sick empty sensation in his stomach and a rapidly beating heart” (30-31).
Clearly, Peter can see Francis’s distress; in fact, he is the only person in the story that can grasp Francis’s feelings thanks to his special connection with him. The last thing that Peter thinks before the game of hide and go seek began was that “there’s nothing to fear in the dark” (33), and even if Francis does remain fearful, he can step in and relieve his worries as he has always done. Thus, it is even more ironic that it is the physical connection of the two brothers which ends up killing Francis in the dark.
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