The Ending Of Revolutionary Road: Suicide Or Accident?

I’m adding a plea here since this is easily the post most often read. Please read on!

Well, my journey towards my first goal is all but over; having handed in my thesis in February and had my Viva in May (in the UK everyone has to have a Viva), and having passed, I will graduate in July.

So that’s that. A chapter of a life complete and I do feel a sense of achievement though inevitably I wish I could have done it better – fewer split infinitives for one thing! Now, what you may well ask: perhaps I will try to turn it into a book. There should be interest bearing in mind schools and universities are teaching Yates.

This is where you come in. If you are a student (or a teacher) and have been dropping in on my blog, could you let me know what your school is (wherever it is): the name, the place and what you have been studying in the way of Yates. If I need proof he is being taught the more of you that do that the more proof I will have. I won’t publish your responses unless you want me to. I know DeWitt Henry has been teaching Yates at Emerson College in Boston and I know he is being taught at Ipswich School in the UK and at Sherborne School also in the UK but you will agree that that is hardly proof of anything. So please get back to me!

So how do we read the ending of Revolutionary Road? Yes, powerful, tragic, bold and uncompromising but what happens? Does April set out to abort their unwanted child knowing it will kill her or does she do it hoping it won’t? Yates seems to offer both possibilities side by side. I’ve already debated this briefly over email with Blake Bailey who comes down firmly on the side of a tragic accident but I veer towards reading this as suicide. She knew the date for a ‘safe’ termination was well past. She heard him rip into their marriage the night before. She had faced the hollowness of their union and laughed in his face. She sat up all night writing what seem to be ‘farewell’ letters to him while he drunkenly slept on. She prepares a farewell breakfast (or is it invested with the hope that a new beginning is about to start? – I don’t think so) and she takes a poignant interest in his dull job to throw him completely off the scent. But then, of course, there are her phone calls…why be so very upset when calling Milly if she didn’t think she was going to die? I know I sound hard-hearted but was an impending abortion traumatic enough to justify this degree of distress? Maybe. And yet we have Yates’s objective correlative to help position us here: ‘The cigarette broke and shredded in her fingers’. Is the sound of children playing so distressing because she knows she will never see hers again or is it that she just fears she won’t?

Then, after she has injected herself, why make that call for an ambulance? We have to presume it was her call – there was no one else there. Mendes/Haythe shows her calling; Yates doesn’t. Mendes, then, makes that decision clear; she is calling for help and wants to survive. Yates takes us in both directions at once but to my mind she intends to die even though her final, short note to Frank, ‘whatever happens’, suggests that she still intends to live….Frank, however, is certain it was a deliberate act – ‘She did it to herself, Shep. She killed herself.’

Your thoughts would help but I suspect Yates intended that we could never decide.

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This entry was posted on December 17, 2008 at 4:50 pm and is filed under Debatable issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.