Word: rufus
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...first of the novel's three parts is full of joy intensified by the painful difficulty of breaking out of loneliness and communicating this joy to loved ones: Rufus sees a Charlie Chaplin movie with his father and they walk quietly home looking "across the darkness at the lights of North Knoxville"; Jay, roused late at night to come to his sick father's bedside, makes his wife's breakfast in the 3:00 a.m. quiet of the kitchen to thank her because she had troubled to rise and make him something warm for the long night journey...
...never awake to tease them, or sing to them. Mary no less then they, must become more "grown-up" and realize what this death will mean. She once said her children were "brought up to trust older people when they tell (them) something. . . ." But she had promised Catherine and Rufus the night of Jay's death that he would be home when they awoke...
...take of those who people his beautifully evoked scenes with a grasp of the complexity in human relationships that is almost painful. He realizes that motives are never clear, be they involved in buying a cap or loving someone. His art skillfully builds up the tense situation of Rufus trying to select a cap that will not offend his Aunt's tastes, and yet satisfy his own preference for gaudy colors. She is equally concerned about not intimidating him in the choice, and the result is a scene of touching humor...
...Rufus is at an age when he can feel this duplicity of love and hate in the concrete, sensual way of children--and poets--without forgetting its reality through the over self-consciousness of adult introspection. The development into this state is what marks the process of his growing up. Agee traces this growth through the boy's encounter with new words. At first "concussion" is an interesting sound, harsh and hard. Then he learns it is connected with a blow, just as it sounds, and that it is what killed his father. "Chariot," in "Swing low sweet chariot...
...poetic mixture of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch that makes up a child's world is most beautiful in scenes of Rufus alone written outside the general text: "... (the curtains in the room) ... were touched by the carbon light of the street lamp, they were as white as sugar. The extravagant foliage which had been wrought into them by machinery showed even more sharply white where the light touched, and elsewhere was black in the limp cloth." These scenes were meant to be inserted in the story's sequence a la Faulkner, but Agee died before...