Rule of the Bone

Rule of the Bone is a bildungsroman (a coming-of-age novel) about Chappie who, at 14, exists at the fulcrum between youth and adolescence. The book is very much in conversation with other classic works in this genre, most notably J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye; both books feature first person, stream-of-consciousness narrators, and both books are about narrators who struggle with feeling like an outsider to society. However, the differences between Chappie and Holden Caulfield go beyond the generation gap (the 1940s of Catcher in the Rye present opportunities for trouble that are much less extreme than those in Rule of the Bone). Chappie is younger, at 14, and is a victim of long-term sexual abuse at the hands of his stepfather, which he initially talks around in his narration before becoming more explicit about his experiences as the novel goes on. This causes him intense anger coupled with a sense of powerlessness and drives him to seek out trouble, though he is often overwhelmed by the circumstances he ends up in.

It's important to consider the function of the stream-of-consciousness narration: It provides an in-depth look at Chappie’s interiority and motivations and works to set the tone of the book. It also helps to fully realize Chappie’s character as someone who is impulsive and acts in ways that wouldn’t be understood by those around him—if the reader is shown Chappie’s train of thought as he moves through sometimes disconnected ideas, they will empathize with him. There’s also self-consciousness at work in the narration, which begins in the first sentence of the novel: “You’ll probably think I’m making a lot of this up just to make me sound better than I really am or smarter or even luckier but I’m not” (1).

In any book that uses this mode, there’s an unspoken contract between character and reader: that they are explicitly the audience of the book. Sometimes, this happens voyeuristically; in Catcher, the implication is that Holden Caulfield is telling his story to someone at the institution where he’s living. Here, there’s no specific audience, but there is an underlying character motivation that surfaces at times, particularly when the narration addresses the audience: Chappie wants to be a reliable narrator because he’s spent so much of his life either being disbelieved or ignored.

In the opening chapters of the book, Chappie is primarily reactionary: He has a troubled home life, so he smokes marijuana; he needs money to buy marijuana, so he starts stealing from the coin collection; he’s found out, so he impulsively shoots up the house. At his young age, he can’t make plans that have long-term goals or consequences, but he is expected to, and when people expect more of him, like when his mother wants him to come back home, he is more likely to drive them away than agree. Often, though, he begins by trying to do the right thing, as he does when he sees Buster Brown and Froggy at the mall in Chapter 3.

In Froggy, he sees himself, thinking, “The little girl in the red dress was wearing binoculars over her eyes like I did when I was her age and she couldn’t see that she was in danger” (30). His attempt to rescue her is built out of a desire to rescue himself at that age, but to do so he must put himself in the exact sexual danger he cannot cope with. When he has successfully lured Buster Brown away from Froggie, he goes through with his plan until he sees the naked mannequins, when he says, “It’s like they’re adults but they’re really little kids” (37). This dichotomy is at the core of Chappie’s story, especially in the first half of the book: He’s trying to be an adult in a harsh, violent world, but he’s emotionally and mentally incapable of doing so.