What you do in life, good, bad, otherwise, comes back to haunt you. And the suicide of Robert X is an embodiment of that lesson.

In reading about this book, in preparation for this essay, I came across a conversation the author had with John Lowe concerning the tight narrative quality of the book, and I think in commenting about it, Gaines underscores one of the book's major themes:

WP: There's nothing wasted in that book. It's totally honest and almost foreordained from the beginning, from the first page.

Gaines: A great man falls, and what he's going to do when he gets up. He feels that even God had failed him. He could not even please God any more (Lowe 184).

This theme, or question rather, of how does one deal with failure is an important one, on the individual level as well as on the group level. How...
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