Survival Instincts: A Passage Analysis by Victoria Carson

Around the middle of Chang-Rae Lee’s novel The Surrendered, June thinks about her life when Nicholas was home. At this point the reader can already sense that they have an unusual relationship, and her account of hearing him gasping at night is a good example of her complicated maternal feelings:  

…the first time she nearly tripped while getting up too fast, afraid that he was choking, but it turned out, then and other times, that he was crying in his sleep. He wasn’t deeply distressed—it was the softest crying, self-muffled, if that was possible—and although it would have been the simplest thing to wake and comfort him, she inexplicably stood over him in the dark, staring at his racked mouth and the tight, quivering shrug of his shoulders, and it took everything in her to renounce the thought that here was a boy she would have to carry about forever. (249)

June’s first reaction, rushing to the side of her potentially choking child, is expected, and is even arguably excessive since at this point Nicholas is far from infantile. Still, given June’s experience with death as a child, this reaction seems normal enough. The passage takes a strange turn, however, when she discovers that Nicholas’s life is not endangered, but instead he is suffering emotionally. Her maternal instincts seem to fail her, and she is aware of it. Although she notices that comforting him would have been the “simplest thing,” she is not filled with desire to soothe her son from his sorrows; she “inexplicably” stands there and watches his subconscious misery.

This seeming lack of maternal feeling would be interesting enough on its own, but her last thought really drives home the complication of her emotions. As she sees her son’s vulnerability, her instinctive response is to view him as a burden that she is stuck with forever. This sentiment is unexpected considering her initial fear that his life was endangered, but it is not wholly surprising. June’s thought here echoes her feeling in chapter one as she tried to keep her young siblings alive, sacrificing everything she could survive without. Then, as now, she struggled to not view her dependents “as though they were killing her” (10). These early survival instincts of wanting to cut off any dead weight seem to have infiltrated June’s entire life, including motherhood. Understanding how her early experiences influence her view of dependents can help us grasp the complications of her maternal relationship with Nicholas.

Victoria Carson