Sentence Analysis in The Evolution of My Brother

     As readers, we can learn a lot from the presence of dreams in short stories. Dreams, by nature, are more “free-form” than our lived experiences—and, of course, we all know about the “psychologist urge” to analyze our dreams, to pick them apart and see what our subconscious minds are trying to tell us. So perhaps we can engage in a bit of Freudian dream interpretation with Jenny’s dream from The Evolution of My Brother (even though I personally hate Freud—but that’s a whole other can of worms). As she describes a dream that she has while napping next to her brother one afternoon during her teenage years, Jenny writes: 

“When the war was over, I knelt down by my brother’s injured body and hacked him into four pieces. It was up to me to give him a proper funeral, but I had only two hands and couldn’t figure out which parts of him to carry back and bury and which parts to leave behind.” 

To begin with, this dream section is set apart from everything else in the narrative without any further elaboration—maybe suggesting that we should pay a little extra attention and interpret it ourselves. In her dream, Jenny envisions herself and her brother on “opposing sides of a civil war,” indicating that while she clearly has a sense of affection and responsibility for her brother, her relationship with him is also tense enough for her to battle with him figuratively. She then hacks him into four pieces, an action that parallels her desire to “shed the skin” of her adolescent life at home. We see her mourn her lack of freedom and harbor a strange resentment towards her family and her brother after she returns from her summer program at Stanford, lamenting the fact that she can’t “even properly daydream without thinking about my brother crying alone… How did he find his way into everything?” 

However, in the dream, Jenny also states that it is up to her to give her brother, whom she has just killed and hacked to pieces, a proper funeral. But why her, if she was the one who committed such an atrocity to him in the first place? Perhaps her feeling of responsibility for burying her brother might stem from her guilt over the trauma that she may (or may not) have inflicted onto him as a child. Throughout this narrative, we hear about her brother’s complex relationship with food—for instance, in his early teen years, he is rushed to the hospital for swallowing a penny. However, when both of them are quite young, Jenny makes her brother cry during a fight while he has a ball of ham in his mouth. She confesses, after recounting this, that “seeing him like that made me feel like a monster… it would be my fault later in life when he wouldn’t take packed ham and cheese sandwiches to school…. it had always been my fault.” Of course, since our entire picture of the brother is formed from Jenny’s (rather biased) perspective, we are left unsure as to whether his later disordered-eating tendencies truly originated from this “ham incident.” Nonetheless, we know that Jenny has a deep-set sense of guilt over the effects she may have had on her brother’s development, and perhaps this is why she feels that she must bury his body in her dream—despite the fact that she’s destroyed him, she must also take responsibility for the pieces she’s left behind. 

However, what is the significance of Jenny not being able to “figure out which parts of him to carry back and bury and which parts to leave behind”? Later on in the story, Jenny expresses regret and grief at “how fast a childhood happens,” as well as the fact that her brother has to be bribed by their parents to speak to her, however briefly, over the phone while she is away at college. The fact that she cannot carry all of him back to bury may refer to the fact that she cannot carry all of her ties with her brother into her future. This includes their relationship as a whole, but also perhaps the aforementioned guilt that she carries regarding the events of their childhood, such as the “ham trauma.” Her dream is her way of processing and illustrating her complex feelings towards her brother—her resentment, her responsibility, and also the inner conflict she feels about wanting to hold him close as much as she wants to let him go.