love as death has faced him in the eyes once too many. Billy deals with his pain by turning to alcohol abuse, he cannot deal with his mourning, “Sometimes it’s not as if they have died so much as that I myself have died and become a ghost.” (43). From Dolores and Billy, the central theme is slowly revealed.The central character in which the story takes off upon is Mitchell Stephens. He is drawn into this case by his own anger. He has his own sense of suffering and confusion toward his own daughter. Stephens is torn by his urge to save her and his fear that he can’t possibly do so. He recalls the flashback of his little girl as a toddler at a near death experience and him as her father while singing to her, held her life in his own hands prepared to perform an emergency tracheotomy. And in that way, Stephens’ own experience bonds together with the nightmare of those pain stricken parents: the ultimate unbearable burden of caring for children where strength will be tested beyond its limits. Stephen’s own daughter in whom he loves dearly has been taken away from him although she is not dead; she is practically gone out of his life. He is pissed off, “enough rage and helplessness, your love turns to steamy piss.” (101). Stephen is set to find the cause, something or someone to blame for their misfortunes and to rage against whatever forces took their child, “I don’t know if it was the Vietnam war…I don’t know which are the causes and which are the effects;” (99). On one hand, our perception of Mitchell Stephen is of a lawsuit vampire, pursuing a solution no one needs while on the other he is the very human victim of fate.Perhaps the most powerful of all the point of views is the thoughts of Nichole Burnell. Although she is still an adolescent at the age of fourteen, she seems more adult than anyone else with so much more self-knowledge. She feels th...
