Entrapment and Escape

The novel explores themes of entrapment and escape within a range of distinct and overlapping storylines. Because The Bee Sting narrative follows all four members of the Barnes family, the author explores these themes via Cass, PJ, Imelda, and Dickie. As the novel unfolds, parallels between the family members’ experiences of reality begin to accumulate. In particular, all of the family members feel trapped by their circumstances and desperate to find an escape from them.

In the novel’s opening section, “Sylvias,” for example, the feelings of entrapment that Cass experiences recur in the subsequent sections, which follow PJ, Imelda, and Dickie respectively. As a teenager, Cass feels trapped by her hometown and family. Cass and Elaine feel that the homicide in “the next town over” is unsurprising because “it’s something to do” in their otherwise static region (3, Murray’s italics). As “Sylvias...