SOURCE: Morrison, Kristin. “The Genealogy of Evil.” In William Trevor, pp. 19-36. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993.

In the following essay, Morrison investigates the role of evil in several of Trevor's short stories.

Trevor's analysis of the evil permeating human history does not simply link adult suffering with childhood misfortunes or trace twentieth-century blight back through the ages to an original sin in a garden of Eden. Such commonplace chains of evil are transformed by the revelation that his characters participate in their own wounding, that the originator of sin is not one man only in the past but each person along the way. Childhood trauma is never merely something inflicted from without, something inherited, some physical or psychic mutilation in which the child is simply an innocent victim. The trauma often involves a game in which the child is a significant player.

A paradigm of this process is...