Along The Frontage Road Analysis

Death and denial are always interlinked. More often than not in more ways than one, people deny the existence of death itself or deny their part in a death. The latter type of denial occurs in the short story Along the Frontage Road by Michael Chabon. Denial also appears in Lamb to Slaughter by Roald Dahl and The Terrapin by Patricia Highsmith. All of these stories use physical death as a way to expose an internal death caused by a character’s experience with the Freudian concept of denial. In The Frontage Road, the death of an unborn child illuminates the father’s denial of his involvement in the termination of his wife’s pregnancy. The father realizes that he needs to take a step forward when he takes his six-year-old son to a cheesy parking lot pumkin sale. Nick, the son, hands his father a tiny pumpkin and asks to name it Kate, the same name the family had planned to name the daughter. The father has a conversation with his living son:
“‘Kate can have that one.’
‘All right.’
‘Because she didn’t get to have a pumpkin, since she didn’t get to ever be alive.’
‘Good thinking,’ I said.” (Chabon, 8)
This is the first time the father realizes that his son remotely understands what has happened to his mother and his sister. The father finally grasps that he is involved in the decision and that he now
Little does she know he has been cheating on her (presumably) and is leaving her that night. As soon as she hears this, “her first instinct was not to believe any of it, to reject it all. It occurred to her that perhaps he hadn’t even spoken, that she herself had imagined the whole thing” (Dahl, 110). When she recovers from the denial, she kills her husband with a frozen leg of lamb (yummy). The murder is her final realization and acceptance and the end of the denial of her situation. The author uses physical death to shatter the wall of denial the wife had