Rachel Harper, one of my mentors at Spalding University, suggested that I read Russell Banks’ The Sweet Hereafter to understand alternating narrators and character development. I had been struggling to connect sense of place with my characters and avoid the pitfalls of being sentimental or a bombastic orator. This is something I feel necessary in writing, particularly with stories about society’s structures and awareness.
Banks’ uses four narrators, four very different perspectives, to shape the reader’s understanding of tragedy, loss, and hope. Each narrator is a character in the story living in the village of Sam Dent. They depict life before and after a bus accident in the village of Sam Dent, where over twenty children die in a terrible school bus accident. All of it coalesces into a greater understanding of small-town American life. Many small towns in America have experienced the loss of many children. They represent the future and people left behind to grieve.
Delores Driscoll, the school bus driver and life-long resident of Sam Dent, takes the reader on a ride with her driving the children to the school. Her narration feels like she is reliving this memory, over and over again. She is going over every detail to try and make sense of that unfortunate day. Her detailed account delivers a sense of place with honesty through personal opinions of each child lost in the crash, elaborating on their family and home life, “Poverty and house trailers are not uncommon in Sam Dent” (Banks 9). Much like a tour guide, her nearly daily contact with the children of Sam Dent outside of their homes gives Delores direct insight into their personal lives and insight into herself.
Delores’ personal knowledge of Sam Dent comes from growing up on a dairy farm just outside of town on one of the original homesteads. Her knowledge of the people and surrounding community represents a social history of the village and rural life in the mountains. Along her bus route on Bartlett Hill, she has “three stops in short order” (Banks 15), where the families that live there have built on “lots out of a tract of land that had once belonged to my father and grandfather” (Banks 15). She sold them the land, and watched them build their homes “piecemeal”, but never regretted it:
I’d rather watch the little tatty Capes and ranches of local folks, people I’ve known since they were children themselves, going up on that land than the high-tech summer houses and A-frame ski lodges…built by rich yuppies from New York City who don’t give a damn for this town or the people in it. (Banks 15)
The community is her identity. Delores lets the reader know how Sam Dent is different than Lake Placid and other towns that tourist are attracted to. Tourists can never understand her point-of-view, because “Sam Dent is one of those towns that’s on the way to somewhere else, and when people get this far (from New York City), they usually keep going” (Banks 21).
Billy Ansel’s story follows Delores’. He has the only eyewitness account of the bus accident, because he was following the bus and saw it veer off the highway into a frozen lake. His two children died in that accident. Much of his narrative depicts his character through his view of Sam Dent. He understands how life in Sam Dent follows a certain natural order, unfettered by the fast pace and modern conveniences of big city life that seem unnatural, or outside the laws of nature. He believes in cause and effect, as each generation passes, another one comes up to replace them. For Billy the accident is, “so profoundly against the necessary order of things, that we cannot accept it. It’s almost beyond belief or comprehension that the children should die before the adults” (Banks 78). One of the most profound statements about a parent losing a child.
Billy’s sense of place continues to try and make sense of tragedy. “A town that loses its children loses its meaning” (Banks 78). The natural balance of life has been upset by the accident, and the future of Sam Dent is in jeopardy. This mirrors Delores’ sentiments earlier. The loss of a child is personally devastating, as well as catastrophic for a town, because without the children of a small town, no one will want to settle there and be a part of the community. We understand Billy’s trauma and the extent to which it reaches.
The next narrator is Mitchell Stephens, a big-shot lawyer from New York City. He has an outsider’s view of Sam Dent. This lawyer is familiar with small towns, due to the many lawsuits he pursues in rural communities. He believes his part in the tragedy is to redeem the people’s hope after such horrific circumstances. But, the reader knows he is there only to get a big payout from these children’s death.
Many of Mitchell’s ideas about Sam Dent are presented in the physical description of the upstate region, “It’s dark up there, closed in by mountains of shadow and a blanketing early nightfall” (Banks 93). He depicts a world dominated by massive trees, and a harsh inescapable weather, “It’s a landscape that controls you, sits you down and says, shut up pal, I’m in charge here” (Banks 93). His narration has the advantage of contrasting rural life with big city life; Sam Dent is entirely populated by trees with a few people and businesses living among them, and the only sound is from the constant howling of the wind through the empty boughs, not the jackhammers or traffic he is more accustomed, too.
His outsider’s view of Sam Dent is full of ignorance through statements such as, “Most of the people who live there year round are scattered in little villages in the valleys, living on food stamps and collecting unemployment, huddling close to their fires and waiting out the winter” (Banks 94). He compares the poor of New York City as living on reservations, “Not like Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant, where you feel that the poor are imprisoned… life long prisoners of the rich, who live and work in the high-rises outside” (Banks 95). Then, he portrays the poor of Sam Dent as ostracized, “Made to forage in the woods for their sustenance and shelter, grubbing nuts and berries” (Banks 95), living in the ancient fictitious world of Ultima Thule, a northern land that is beyond the civilized world. For Mitchell, the people of Sam Dent are to be pitied, and stirred to anger so that they can enact some form of revenge, which is exactly the opposite belief of Billy and Delores, who want to grieve and move on.
The fourth narrator is Nichole Burnell, a survivor of the crash and wheelchair bound for the rest of her life due to the injuries sustained in the crash. Her view of home life in Sam Dent gives the reader a better view of everyday life: her relationships with her parents and brothers and sister, and the babysitting of other kids in town, as well as her friends and boyfriend. Before the crash she was a cheerleader, academically gifted, and had a bright future for herself, yet plagued with the dark secret of incest. Aspects of her daily life, how she eats, where she goes to the bathroom, how she interacts with others, change dramatically after the accident. She reflects upon these changes within her life, looking at how her life was and how her life will be, which is unusual for a healthy teenager.
Nichole’s character comes through her sense of place. She shows it best when she writes about the founder of the village, Sam Dent. The paper is so well done, she is asked to use it for a salutatorian speech, only if she “Cut out all the bad things he (Sam Dent) had done, like cheating the Indians out of their land and buying his way out of the Civil War things that lots of people did in those days but that were just as bad then as they would be now” (Banks 188). There are wide swaths of history, positive and enlightening, that she keeps from the reader, and the brief historical account of the town the reader encounters contains negative aspects of Sam Dent. She has the intellect to comment on the teachers wanting her to edit the paper, and she feels these details need to remain, because without them the town will forget its past.
Russell Banks use of four very different narrators is a masterful way to develop his characters. Each narrator depicts a unique perspective of Sam Dent, and gives the reader a more complete sense of place. From the grand physical landscape, to the social connections of the people, Sam Dent becomes a character—more than a dot on a map. We embrace these characters through their loss and grief, and sense of place adds a critical layer of depth to their development.
Michael Leo Premo 
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