Townie Final Response

Andre Dubus III’s “Townie” chronicles a life defined by violence, it paints a picture of a boy who grew up alone and helpless in a world where violence was often the only answer people understood to all of their problems.  He grows up wanting to be violent, spends much of his life expressing himself through violence, and then spends the rest of the novel trying to overcome his own violent nature.  This overcoming of man’s own violent tendencies is central to both the novel and the film “the fighter”.    

Some of the earliest memories that Dubus recalls in “Townie” are conflict related.  The conflict between his father and mother had a profound impact on Andre.  The moment when his two parents finally end their marriage for good is only reflected on twice in the memoir, once when it happens and another time at the death of Andre’s beloved father.  The closeness in which he holds the end of his family and the end of his fathers life is indicative of powerful emotional distress indeed.  The tone of the memoir also abruptly changes after this initial conflict is introduced.  What was once a nostalgic look back at setting fires in the woods and building snow forts becomes a dark reflective piece on the nature of manhood.   Of course his urge to harm others is not solely a product of his parents estranged relationship, as his mother struggles to feed him, Andre is left to his own devices, and for the first several years after his parents separation he chooses to spend his days shut in his house with his two sisters.  He does this not because he is lazy but because his environment is so hostile,  he speaks of witnessing brutal beatings at school, as well as being threatened and beat himself by neighboring children.  In this environment and without a strong male figure in his life Dubus’s view of what a man should be becomes deeply skewed. He idolizes action movie heroes like Buford Pusser and Billy Jack, fictional men who carry out  swift black and white justice with fists and the odd 2x4. Thusly he sets about trying to conquer his own fears and become one of these action heroes, ultimately becoming one of those feared men he saw as a child.   

It is an interesting and upsetting reality that socioeconomic hardship often turn men to violence, along with Dubus, Mickey Ward of “The Fighter” is another example of a man turned to violence in the lower class mill towns of the Merrimack Valley. Although his early life is not touched upon in the film, it is implied through his nature and the nature of his family, that he too was exposed to violence growing up.  Ward remains calm and collected throughout his families multiple brawls, including the plate throwing scene and the scene in which his sisters attack his girlfriend, and as a result it seems obvious that he is no stranger to such violence especially amidst his family.  

Both express their violence in different ways.  Andre chooses to take out his aggression physically on those whom he sees as aggressors, bullies and oppressors.  The racist fraternity brothers in texas, the raucous air travelers at the airport and the man he saw beating a woman in broad daylight were all people who were abusing others weaker than them and for a time Dubus justifies these beatings.  In the fighter Ward also fights for the perceived good of others, in the scene where the audience to Ward’s love interest, Charlene.  When  she is seen being harassed by local bar stiffs Ward starts a brawl downing the men responsible.  However Ward’s violence comes more into play in the boxing ring, while Andre Dubus uses boxing as a way to pass time and stay in shape, Ward must be violent in order to make a living, and ultimately, to gain the approval of his family.

In both pieces the men ultimately seek to escape violence.  Over time Dubus realises that the beatings he justifies as “helping others” are more for himself than those he helps.  After the Airport incident he recalls being fascinated by action stars in his earlier childhood, all of the sudden he can relate to those men, and instead of feeling accomplished he feels upset, summing his feelings up perfectly,  

“That boy who Clay Whelan  had chased through the streets of the south end felt proud and vindicated and accomplished and brave. But the young man I was, the one who wrote daily and tried to capture the many conflicting layers of living a life, knew better.” (Dubus, 332)

He realises that all of his violence is just a manifestation of his younger selves emotions, his fear, the weakness, in his own words he feels “proud and vindicated and accomplished and brave”.  Yet even when he realizes the root of his violence he still struggles to avoid it.  He tries all different methods to escape the violence around him early on in his life, before he begins his violent streak, he turns to drugs, as an escape from the world around him.  Much like Andre, Mickey’s brother Dickey also turns to drugs as a means to escape unfavorable situations in Lowell.  However the negative side effects make drugs neither a safe nor favorable option, luckily enough for Andre he does not develop any addictions and rids himself of said false remedies, the same cannot be said for Dickey however.  Later on in life Andre turns to boxing, in the hopes that it will be an outlet for some of his rage, however he remains violent, eventually he abandons this pastime.  Ironically enough, in “The Fighter” Ward struggles with the violence of boxing , at one point locking himself in his house after a particularly bloody match, only coming out at the behest of his girlfriend.  In the end however Ward finds harmony in balancing the needs of his family/career with a love for his girlfriend and daughter.

Dubus’s relationship with violence often relates to his relationship with his father.  

Andre repeatedly struggles for a way to tell his father that he does not want to be violent.  

“You need to tell him how it was. He still thinks this was just a sport for you.  He’ll listen now. Tell him how it was... to tell him how my boyhood was was to tell him how it was not, and I did not want to hurt this man who’d been run over and crippled for stopping on the highway to help someone. I did not want to hurt this man in black sitting in his wheelchair.”(Dubus, 372)

He feels that telling this to his father would crush his father and destroy the relationship they had built up.  He even admitted at the presentation he gave us that not telling his father how he felt about him is one of his biggest regrets and one of the only things about his life that he would go back and change if he could.  

By the end of “Townie” however Dubus had basically conquered his violent streak, several things contributed to this. First off is his writing, his writing helped him in innumerable ways. In one way it gave him empathy, to write about so many different people from different backgrounds, he had to put himself in their shoes, “I was finding again and again in my daily writing that I had to become these other people, a practice that also seemed to put me more readily in another’s shoes even when I wasn’t writing.” he writes, by putting himself in others shoes he becomes less inclined to want to cause hurt to another.  His rage at the world was still however present, but his writing gave him solace once more,  “The hurt and rage that forever seemed to lie just beneath the surface of my skin was not gone but had been consistently directed to my notebooks Jabs had become single words, a combination had become sentences and rounds had become paragraphs.”  Dubus uses this memoir to describe how he uses his writing as a channel for all rage and drive towards physical aggression.  He was just as enthusiastic about writing during his presentation, he said that the writing of this very memoir proved to be very cathartic,  almost treating it as a final piece of closure.   

If you had to pick a moment in Townie where he turns his life around for good it would be the train scene. Andre encounters a group of drug dealers on a train packed with small school girls.  He feels it necessary to intervene in some way but he had an ominous premonition of his demise,  “I didn’t want to die, I was 31 years old. I was in love with my wife. We wanted all those things people want before they, too, are cut down. If I’d felt terror before this I was wrong.” (Dubus, 343) , for the first time in the story since he was a boy he was generally afraid for his own life.  Now that he had found someone else to love he had a reason to live.  Because of this fear and this love for his wife he did not fight back when the drug dealer threatened him, instead he solved the encounter by talking instead of fighting .  After this encounter he feels as though that bad part of himself has been taken away, “A part of me seemed to have died anyway, and what remained watched myself walk behind the dealer through both doors, through the outer and then inner, into the warm and quiet car of safe and sleeping girls”(358)

Here he truly abandons his old ways, in fact in his presentation he confirmed that since his last incident over 2 decades ago he has not been violent once.  

As a recap, both the lives of Andre Dubus in Townie and Mickey Ward in “The Fighter” were both violent men. Through no fault of their own, via family situation, economic situation and general exposure to said violence, they were shaped in to violent men.  After being exposed to said violence they developed measures to justify acting in such ways.  It is only after they learn about their own passions, their own love, their own reasons to live, that they learn to cope with their violent