Empire Falls

“What he discovered was that violating his own best nature wasn’t nearly as unpleasant or difficult as he’d imagined. In fact, looking around Empire Falls, he got the distinct impression that people did it every day.”

C. B. Whiting, scion of the Whiting family textile empire, decides to compromise his desires, his true self, and his principles in order to serve the family business. This statement reveals a conflation between the rich and the poor: Both the wealthy Whiting family members and the workers that toiled in poverty to increase their riches made compromises “every day.”

‘“I want to live there,’ she [Tick] confessed, like someone who saw no harm in confessing a sin she was never likely to have the opportunity to commit.”

This comparison emphasizes Tick’s innocence, as she naively expresses a desire that, because of class and financial barriers, is not likely to pass. The sentence also conflates Tick’s secular desire for religious confession, establishing one of the author’s main themes throughout the book.

“But on other occasions—and there had been several of these—when Miles himself had become discouraged and offered the same argument to his employer, Mrs. Whiting quickly retreated and urged him not to give up, reminding him that the Empire Grill was a landmark, that it was the only non-fast food establishment in town, and the Empire Falls, if its residents were to remain at all hopeful about the future, needed the grill to survive, even if it didn’t thrive.”

The Empire Grill itself is a symbol of Empire Falls. Hardly successful and clinging to existence, it nevertheless maintains its status as a representation of what Empire Falls used to be, and thus of what it could become again. It is an emblem of hope and failure simultaneously.