The Victims 11/23

"The Victims" by Sharon Olds

Sharon Olds was born in 1942 and is an American Poet. She has won many awards for her writing over the years such as the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the 1984 National Books Critic Circle Award, and the first San Francisco Poetry Center award in 1980. She currently teaches creative writing at NYU.

When Mother divorced you, we were glad. She took it and
took it in silence, all those years and then
kicked you out, suddenly, and her
kids loved it. Then you were fired, and we
grinned inside, the way people grinned when
Nixon's helicopter lifted off the South
Lawn for the last time. We were tickled
to think of your office taken away, 
your secretaries taken away, 
your lunches with three double bourbons, 
your pencils, your reams of paper. Would they take your
suits back, too, those dark
carcasses hung in your closet, and the black
noses of your shoes with their large pores? 
She had taught us to take it, to hate you and take it
until we pricked with her for your 
annihilation, Father. Now I
pass the bums in doorways, the white
slugs of their bodies gleaming through slits in their
suits of compressed silt, the stained
flippers of their hands, the underwater
fire of their eyes, ships gone down with the
lanterns lit, and I wonder who took it and 
took it from them in silence until they had
given it all away and had nothing 
left but this. 

“The Victims” begins as a second person narrative where the narrator is referring to her father and “you”. The tone is very bitter and indignant with the narrator mercilessly calling her father out on his luxurious and insensitive lifestyle. The very first line explains how she was glad when her mother divorced her father and “kicked him out”. She describes her glee when she found out her father had gotten fired and would no longer have his office, secretaries, “lunches with three double bourbons”, suits, etc. Additionally she characterizes her mother as the victim describing how her mother “took it and took it, in silence, all those years” and the narrator creates a unit with her mother and other siblings as she uses the pronoun “we” throughout the poem. This is how the first 17 lines go.

However, at the end of line 17 there is a significant tone shift as the narrator addresses her father. The “you” in the poem is now her father and she is talking directly to him in a very sympathetic manner. She recalls bums she has seen on the street who begin to seem like victims. The picture she paints is depressing as she describes their bodies as “slugs” and their hands as “stained flippers”. The narrator seems to not have forgotten about her father’s past and how his actions affected her family, but recognizes that her mother and siblings were not the only victims not her father the only villain. The way the narrator set up the poem with two different parts each carrying their own unique point of view and tone helps bring the idea of the poem full circle.