The Last Rung on the Ladder

“And I had no one I could tell…a thing like that letter, it’s too personal to tell anyone except a wife or a very close friend.”

Larry has chosen to focus on his career, and as a result he has no close friends or family with whom he can share the tragic letter. This introduces the question of whom Larry is addressing in the text: He refers to the reader or listener as “you,” but given that he has no close family or friends, he must be addressing a stranger. This is important because it signals that his need to tell the story outweighs the relationship—or lack thereof—that he has with the person he’s telling it to.

“Later on, my mother died—Katrina and I were in high school up at Columbia City then—and two years after that my dad lost the place and went to work selling tractors. It was the end of the family, although that didn’t seem so bad then.”

These lines introduce the theme of Family Ties Versus Financial Success. The mother’s death starts to dissolve the bonds between the members of Larry’s family and indirectly leads to another family tragedy, Katrina’s death by suicide. These lines also demonstrate Larry’s lack of interest in maintaining family relationships at the time, though the word “then” points to Larry’s change of heart on the subject.

“And then you could jump off the beam and fall seventy feet straight down, with a horrible hilarious dying swoop, into a huge soft bed of lush hay. It has a sweet smell, hay does, and you’d come to rest in that smell of reborn summer with your stomach left behind you way up there in the middle of the air, and you’d feel…well, like Lazarus must have felt. You had taken the fall and lived to tell the tale.”

Like many other aspects of the story, these lines juxtapose the innocent joy of childhood with the tragedy of death. The reference to Lazarus, a biblical figure who was raised from the dead, foreshadows Katrina’s fall into the small pile of hay where she is miraculously spared from death, as well as her later death.