Moral Disorder Response

Jack Breene

Moral Disorder

            While reading a handful of the stories in Margaret Atwood’s collection, “Moral Disorder” an important theme that stands out is aging and how it effects us. Both the Labrador Diaster and The Boys at the Lab, feature a grownup child narrator with a parent who is becoming very old. For these parents, the father in Labrador and the mother in Boys, aging is a very unpleasant experience. In addition to being lonely, the mother is now a widow and most of her friends have died, both begin to struggle with their bodies in their old age. While the parents continue to lose more and more control of their lives as their physical and mental health deteriorates, the child in both cases gains a new sense of understanding that comes with growing up. For the narrator in both cases, this transformation is bittersweet. On the one hand, the parents treat them as adults, which every kid wants from their parents; but on the other, this new situational awareness allows them to see the true pain their parents are going through.

            A major difference in the Labrador Diaster and The Boys at the Lab, is how the elderly parents have found different ways of escaping the fact they are getting older. In The Boys at the Lab, one of the mother’s defining characteristics throughout the story is that she refused to hold on to the past. In her younger day she had diligently assembles photo albums but after a certain point she couldn’t bear it.  Instead, she preferred to live in the now. But as after she had lost her ability to walk, see, and hear in one ear, living in the now only serves to make her unhappy. While she was able to see, the photo album served as a way that she could escape from thinking about how weak she had become. Instead she could think about the summers by the lake during the war or about Ray and Cam, the two most memorable boys at the lake, or simply what she used to look like and how she used to smile. However, once she sight abandons her, the mother left with nothing but memories, which abandon her too eventually. While commendable, the mother’s confrontation with the truth leaves her feeling miserable during the last stage of her life.

            In the Labrador Diaster, the father, who is suffering from what appears to the be Alzheimer’s, escapes from the reality of his life in a much more complete way.  While the mother would transport herself back while looking at her photographs, the father loses himself when the mother reads him the story of the adventurers. The father pretends that he is in the story which he prefers to his actual life but eventually he is unable to distinguish between what’s real and what’s imaginary. While the process starts slowly, he makes a list of supplies every time he hears the story, at the end he is convinced that he is out there with Hubbard, Wallace and George. While he successful escapes from the misery of old age, he surrenders the ability to pull himself back into reality.