The Sweet Hereafter

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NOVEL RESPONSE PAPER

In The Sweet Hereafter, written by Russell Banks, an accident occurs taking the lives of 14 children on a school bus. There are five different protagonists to the novel who offer a different perspective to the event. Two of whom are closely related and are the most powerful characters to the story Mitchell Stephens and Billy Ansel. The story is about a community immersed in denial. And they seek to place blame as means to ease their pain.

Aside from Nicole Burnell and Dolores Driscoll (Dolores means pain or agony in Italian), Billy Ansel was a main witness of the Sam Dent school bus accident that took the lives of 14 children. Billy describes the community

Many of the folks in Sam Dent have come out since the accident and claimed that they knew it was going to happen someday, oh yes, they just knew it because of Dolores's driving, which, to be fair, is not reckless but casual; or because of the condition of the bus itself, which Dolores serviced at home in her barn, and as a consequence it did not get the same supervision by me as the other school buses got; or because of that downhill stretch of road and the fact that there's almost no shoulder to it on either side of the guardrail; or because of the sandpit below the highway…filled with water…It's a way of living with tragedy, I guess, to claim after it happens that you saw it coming, as if somehow you…made the ... adjustments beforehand…it irritated me to hear it…looking for someone to blame…I was the person closest to the accident and I never saw it coming…I was able that morning…to let my mind fix on the image of the woman I happened to be sleeping with…having an illicit affair with. (Banks, 8-)

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Billy, having his wife die, being a Vietnam vet, and supposedly knowing about life and death, finds himself not being able to cope while guilty about his affair. Unlike the town, he doesn't out right blame Dolores for the accident. He doesn't give into the town's conformity; he knows they are just using her as a scapegoat. He feels guilty because he was right behind the bus yet instead his mind was on the sexual experiences he had mourning over his wife. Billy was lonely while he still had his children; he still had something left and yet had to do something sinful. Now he lost his children too and has nothing left, so continued to destroy himself now with alcohol. His character indulges in pain instead of appreciating what he knows he loves; he focuses on what he lost or the negative things that happened in his life and uses that as an excuse to destroy himself, become depressed, and feel self pity to his embrace pain.

To the outside world he a good, attractive, generous person and maybe deep down he is and even wants to be, but something is wrong with him and he can't get over it. Billy raises his standards to an unreachable level and therefore will never be satisfied. He can even expect the worse as it happens; a self fulfilling prophecy. It takes the deaths of his children in order for him to realize himself or what he had until it was taken from him. Most likely the war did this to him, the society he lived in, and his childhood without a father. Or maybe he does this and lives life this way as a sort of protection and comfort in case negative things do happen. He has himself at a place so that when something does occur he's already down and can't go any lower; it's less painful than going from up to down.

Billy describes himself after the deaths as a ghost and he too is dead. As for drinking, "you might think that remembering those moments is a way of keeping my family alive, but it's not; it's a way of keeping myself alive. Just as you might think drinking is a way to numb the pain; it's not; it's a way to feel the pain (Banks, 44)." In feeling dead, he is numbed and drinks to feel pain, in feeling pain he feels or knows he is alive. The only way he can truly feel is through pain. Billy talks about his father abandoning him and how he's grown bitter with the truth of death that, "it's like paying taxes (Banks, 54)" something you can't stop. Billy denies help from anyone, he says he's fine. He is beyond help.

After a while, people start going away from saying it was an accident and say it was caused. "It was either Dolores's fault or the state's fault for the condition of the road and the sand pit filling with water (Banks 7)." That is how the lawyers got a chance for settlements. The people of the town are destroyed; a town that loses its children before the adults loses its meaning.

Billy rejects Mitchell Stephens, Esquire at first meeting. Billy says he can't help him. Mitchell isn't a greedy lawyer, he's angry. Anger is good for his profession since he's a negligence lawyer. He read about the accident in the paper. "I knew at once that it wasn't an 'accident' at all. There are no accidents… I knew that somebody somewhere had made decision to cut a corner in order to save a few pennies…(Banks,1)." Out of anger, he decides to go to Sam Dent for a case. Mitchell has a certain way of looking at society and its differences between the city and country life; he calls himself an "urban animal". (Banks,)

Mitchell's mission was to make whoever caused the accident pay, saving the life of another child in future accidents, even though he can't even save his own. The people he needs for the lawsuit are the angry ones; the ones who want revenge. Victims or ghosts are useless in the court and are dead like their children. Mitchell can relate to the parents because of his experience with his daughter, but it is anger he needs. What else is needed are people the jury would like, such as Billy Ansel an American war hero who lost his wife and twins, Nicole Burnell a crippled survivor, once a beauty queen, and loved by the town. She is better for court, "a living victim is more effective with a jury than a dead one; you can't compensate the dead…(Banks,10)."

Stephens had to keep Dolores innocent to make big money on the state or school district, but the speed the bus was going was the key. Mitchell's cases and the anger in his blood is what get him going; what keeps him alive. Without that he would be sitting at home alone, and depressed like Billy. In a way, Mitchell can't do anything about his fate, so he joins other misfortunate people and gets angry for them and hope they're angry too. This is his way of venting, a way to keep himself sane, and exist in reality. Billy and Mitchell both had their kids taken from them by society, by corrupt motives

It's like all the children of America are dead to us…In my lifetime something terrible happened that took our children away from us…the middle class grabs what it can buy and passes it on, like poisoned candy…boonies sell their souls with longing for what's killing everyone else's kids and wonder why theirs are on crack. (Banks, )

And it all comes down to money and power; an all American dream.

Although Billy rejects Mitchell, I believe that maybe they would have been able to help each other. Slightly similar to Billy losing his family, Stevens in a way already has. With Billy not accepting the case in the end, I believe it represents how you can't change tragedies, avoid them, or fix them with money. Money only broke up the community more. Although it is his release, Stephens's profession will never really help anyone by what it gains in dollars. It might have even contributed to whatever causes his daughter Zoe to take the route she did. She sarcastically refers to him as, "…my father…a hot shit lawyer…(Banks, 154)," he might have been so busy with his cases as most lawyers are that he didn't give her the time or attention she required. His only control is when Zoe calls him for money. They will always have their losses, and Billy not suing shows that, a forever open ended, no solution problem to their lives.

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