In the beginning, Henry and Connie were both carefree. Henry liked to joke around and “went places” with his brother Lyman in the red convertible they owned together: it is almost as if the brothers go wherever the wind blows them and they live in a world of their own creation. Connie “knew she was pretty and that was everything:” she is popular, enjoys attracting attention, and likes spending time in older boys’ cars. Henry and Lyman are inseparable. Connie and her sister June can hardly get along. The Lamartine boys’ mother loves both of them the same. Connie’s mother very obviously favors her sister.
Unfortunately, who both of our protagonists were is lost by the traumatic events in their lives. When Henry comes back from Vietnam he is but a shadow of his former self. “He was quiet, so quiet, and never comfortable sitting still anywhere but always up and moving around. I thought back to times we’d sat still for whole afternoons, never moving a muscle, watching things.” Henry doesn’t even show a spark of his former self until Lyman beats up the car so he’ll actually do something again. For Connie it is different: when Arnold tells her what he is going to do to her she is lost to her pain before she even experiences it. “She was hollow with what had been fear, but what was now just an emptiness.”
Henry doesn’t want the convertible anymore because to him it symbolizes a happier time when he was carefree and had hope (in other words, everything he had lost), but after the war he is irrevocably changed and cannot get that back. To him the red convertible symbolizes Henry’s lost freedom and happiness. Connie’s experience with the gold jalopy is not so happy. She finds it too bright and doesn’t want to look at it because to her it symbolizes the exact opposite of what the red convertible does for Henry: fear and enslavement. The symbol of her freedom and happiness is the music that she hears everywhere she goes and that provides the soundtrack for her life.
Both stories’ endings are foreshadowed by and are related to the convertibles. As soon as Connie sees Arnold and his gold car the reader knows something bad is going to happen. Lyman tells us in the beginning of “the Red Convertible” that the two brothers owned the car “together until his boots filled with water on a windy night and he bought out my share.” By the end of “the Red Convertible” we know that Henry has drowned and Lyman has sent their car to the same place, but because of the open denouement, we don’t really know if Henry meant to commit suicide. We also don’t know if Connie survives or ever recovers from her experience with Arnold Friend.
It is sad that the moment Henry starts to show a little bit of his former self it is moments before he dies. It is frustrating that Connie gives into her fear instead of trying to save herself. Few have experienced such pain and fear and until we have I don’t think we can truly understand it or withstand it. Lyman experiences this with Henry:
As I watched it I felt something squeezing inside me and tightening and trying to let go all at the same time. I knew I was not just feeling it myself; I knew I was feeling what Henry was going through at that moment. Except that I couldn’t stand it, the closing and opening.Henry gave into his fear, and so did Connie. The reader can stand back from the events they experienced and keep them at arm’s length because they don’t experience them, too: they don’t even read about them in detail, only the effects. But we can all wonder how we would react in the same situation and be thankful that we probably will never have to find out.
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