All Souls: A Family Story From Southie

“I stared at them for a good long time, wondering if they didn’t know how to use their wings, or if they just didn’t know they had them, until it was too late to save themselves.”

Michael’s view on the plight of the cockroaches foreshadows his eventual understanding of why most people never escape from Southie, or from poverty. His contemplations about “wings” that are never properly used act as a symbolic consideration of people’s failure to embrace their own agency and change their lives for the better. Likewise, his instinctive comparison between disadvantaged people and cockroaches indicates the degree to which lower-class people are devalued in society.

“It’s funny, I thought, how the people who seem the meanest, the people we want nothing to do with, might be in the most pain.”

Chickie has always scared Michael because she is confident and intimidating. However, when he learns that she attempted to die by suicide with pills, he realizes that she was hurting in ways that he did not suspect. At a time when he feels like no one understands his own pain, this moment marks a profound shift in his perspective.

“When the thousands of people sang the national anthem, with their right hands over their chest, I cried. It was as if we were singing about an America that we wanted but didn't have, especially the part about the land of the free.”

Michael does not believe that the people of Southie are free because the institutions that he considers to be representative of America—the police, the government—do not behave as though they care about the many struggles and misfortunes of those who live in Southie. By juxtaposing his deep sense of grief with the overtly patriotic theme of the national anthem, MacDonald conveys the message that he and his family feel utterly disenfranchised by the very institutions that are supposedly meant to safeguard their lives and freedoms, developing the theme of