Summary: Section 15
The everyman thinks once again of Nancy, and then about his relationship with his sons Randy and Lonny. They do not keep in contact much, and he feels that it is better to avoid conflict with them. He doesn’t know what he could have done differently to make things better between them, other than to stay married to their mother. He doesn’t tell Randy and Lonny about his hospitalizations, worrying that they will be pleased. The narrator reveals some of the circumstances surrounding why the everyman was unfaithful to Phoebe. Partly because they do not know the full facts behind the everyman’s choices, Randy and Lonny are unable to see the everyman as he really is. He believes that his life would be less lonely if things had turned out differently, but aware that things are not different, he accepts his fate.
Summary: Section 16
The everyman’s relationship with his brother Howie has remained good all his life. Howie’s success as a businessman continues even after he retires. Even though Howie is extremely busy, the brothers always call each other a few times a month, exchanging moments of nostalgia for their shared childhood. However, the everyman becomes jealous of Howie’s good health. He knows it is ridiculous to hate him for this. The everyman is proud of Howie for all his achievements in his business and family life. Still, his jealousy makes him very angry, and he begins to speak with Howie less and less. Even though he knows it is not true, he almost believes that Howie’s good health is responsible for his own bad health.
Summary: Section 17
The everyman starts giving painting lessons partly because he hopes to become involved with a new woman, but he does not feel attracted to any of them. He lusts after the young women he sees jogging on the boardwalk. At the same time, looking at the women running reminds him of his loneliness. He has to struggle not to think of his past life when he had been surrounded with loved ones. He grows bored and disinterested in painting. He has had some success showing and selling his paintings, but later he feels like the failure Randy and Lonny seem to see him as. He thinks then that painting was a distraction from his mortality. He begins to feel a sense of creeping dread, and determines that every activity comes with the risk of backfiring, even painting.
Summary: Section 18
The everyman explains to Nancy that he has stopped painting because he has ended his ability to engage in aesthetic pleasures. The everyman and Nancy argue about the reason why the everyman has not succeeded at painting, with Nancy taking the view that the everyman was too busy and responsible when he was a younger man with a family. The everyman calls himself an amateur. Nancy argues that other people look at and respond strongly to the paintings of his that she has in her home, and that she proudly says that he painted them. The everyman is grateful that Nancy is still proud of him. He puts this down to her generous, spotless character. He attributes the failure of her marriage to her generosity of spirit, since she is unable to see the negative qualities in her husband. The everyman does not fully trust Nancy’s words of comfort because he doesn’t believe she knows what she is talking about. But he takes comfort in them anyway because he has been blessed by her love. Nancy and the everyman discuss swimming, and Nancy’s family, while the everyman thinks with regret of how he treated Nancy’s mother Phoebe, wishing he had not acted to damage their relationship irreparably.
Analysis
The everyman examines the tensions in the relationship he has with his sons Randy and Lonny. All his choices, from leaving their mother, to eventually leaving Phoebe for the flimsy Merete, to his taking up painting as a hobby after retirement, reinforce their view that the everyman is a failure and inauthentic. The everyman frames his own actions as both excusably typical and as facts of his life that cannot be undone. This supports his ongoing stoic outlook and his positioning of himself as average in every way. From his point of view, it is inexplicable that Randy and Lonny reject this outlook and make no attempt to understand his perspective, instead painting him as the worst possible version of himself, an outlier and an extreme character. His protests become increasingly angry and frustrated, culminating at the end of section 15 with the everyman’s thoughts breaking directly through the third person narration to first complain and then to admit life is what it is, restating his stoic framework by which he survives his cutting loneliness.
The everyman continues to take account of his family and what decades of choices and unpreventable twists of fate have left him with at the close of his life. He views these through the lens of stoicism and his self-identification as an average man. While Randy and Lonny see the everyman in what he views as childish, black and white terms rather than the greys of a typical life, the everyman acknowledges that the role he has taken is of absent father who will permit their endless hatred. Their roles have become fixed in a loop of aggression and suffering that the everyman chooses not to break. He places himself within the context of son, brother, and father and successful advertising man to say that he doesn’t need to explain himself to Randy and Lonny. He believes that, at seventy-one, his life is fixed, and this failed relationship is irreparably broken. Stoicism, in this context, is a mask for his rigidity and lack of energy to attempt to communicate.
The everyman’s self-imposed isolation is further explored in relation to Howie. Howie has previously been a source of selfless comfort and support for the everyman. Howie and the everyman share the bond of their childhood and their communal position as links in the chain of their family succession. However, the everyman grows envious of Howie’s seeming resistance of mortality and aging, even as he understands that this is not a result of a choice that Howie has made. The various trappings of a successful life which Howie has, from a good job, to material wealth, to intelligence, to a warm and loving family, are not a source of envy for the everyman. He understands that logically there is no relationship between Howie’s health and his own illness, but the idea persists. This irrational envy does not fully contradict his stoicism, which encourages him to be self-sufficient. However, acting on this envy causes the everyman to break bonds with Howie and feel as much hate for him as Randy and Lonny have for the everyman, creating a bond of misunderstanding and hatred, in the place of bonds of familial love and acceptance.
While the everyman’s relationship with Nancy is freer than with Randy and Lonny or Howie, it is still not completely mature or honest. Nancy calls the everyman each morning before she goes to work, and they discuss his difficulties and doubts over painting. She engages with his philosophy of life, provides rationale for his choices in life, encourages him to avoid disparaging himself, and tells him that when people see his paintings, they form a connection with them. She understands his arguments even as she counters them, and reinforces the idea that he can successfully communicate with the world via his art. To the everyman though, Nancy is still a child, and he cannot take her way of thinking as seriously as other people’s. Nancy’s view of him and his ability to make worthwhile art stems from her purity, a form of childishness that, in opposition to Randy and Lonny’s childishness, allows her to see only the good in people. The everyman doesn’t believe that Nancy knows what she is talking about when she encourages him to enjoy each day, even as this echoes his own guiding principal of taking each day as it comes.
The everyman relies on the physical appearances and emotional labor of women to keep loneliness at a distance. He hopes to meet a woman at his painting class, but there is no one desirable enough for him. Instead he takes refuge in staring at the young women who jog on the boardwalk in front of his condo. He finds them beautiful and appealing, but since they do not touch or speak with him, he remains unfulfilled sexually as well as emotionally, and is reminded even more that he is alone. The young women are physically running by him, while he remains behind, passive and static, his body irrelevant to them. Desire for women continues, but desire to paint fades away, and, as it too was a form of communication with the world, the everyman feels lonely and bored. Nancy becomes the sexless stand-in for the love of women, which the everyman is aware of. He finds himself taking comfort in her despite the fact he does not value her insights and knows he is, in his self-imposed isolation from his most-loved wife Phoebe, an emotional burden to Nancy.
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