Summary

Dell tried to make the best of his domestic situation in Chapter 48 by cleaning up the two-room drafty shack he lived in. He discovered in the many cardboard boxes containing Arthur’s possessions that he seemed reactionary politically, as evinced by the picture of hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan standing before a blazing cross that he found and conservative articles that Arthur wrote in journals while attending Harvard. Dell also came across lots of old possessions abandoned by people who perhaps had “put that life behind them for a crack at a better one somewhere else,” and this recognition reminded him of his parents as “people running from the past, who didn’t look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing” (277).

In Chapter 49, Dell went about his work with...